


The Valkyrie

by BlueSakura007



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Action, Action/Adventure, Age Regression/De-Aging, Alien Biology, Alien Cultural Differences, Alien Culture, Alien Rituals, Aliens, Alternate Reality, Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Banter, Break Up, Comedy, Courtroom Drama, Crushes, Eventual Relationships, Eventual Romance, Exploration, F/M, Fist Fights, Future, Hive Mind, Human Experimentation, Humor, Lovers to Friends, M/M, Male-Female Friendship, Mind Control, Mpreg, Mythology References, Non-Human Humanoid Society, Outer Space, Parallel Universes, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Pop Culture, Post-Break Up, Reconciliation, Sarcasm, Science Fiction, Space Opera, Strong Female Characters, Time Travel, Xenophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:47:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27894055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueSakura007/pseuds/BlueSakura007
Summary: In the late 23rd century, the Planetary Union is an interstellar power consisting of mankind and numerous alien races, with a prosperous Earth as the capital. Jenna Kaufmann, a young officer working for the Union’s starship defence force, is given command of the exploration ship U.S.S. Valkyrie with the suave Commander Martin Keates as her First Officer, and the series follows Jenna and Martin as they and the rest of the ship’s crew explore outer space, meeting both new friends and new enemies alike. From pop culture references to moments of tea tray-based combat, it’s certainly going to be a hell of a ride...[I took inspiration for this from The Orville and various Treks with some DBH characters and Arthur and Ronald from Black Butler, but I’ve tried my best to not just steal everything and I’ve come up with my own characters and things as well. All video links posted in the chapters are meant to be scores played while reading the text underneath it, and the following intelligent alien races are the ones I came up with myself, but I did come up with some of my own cultural stuff for pre-existing species.ArchitectorsArkadansCaphramoidsKzarmiloidsSindariVisteriansYixli]
Relationships: Arthur Conan Doyle/Original Female Character(s), Connor (Detroit: Become Human)/Original Female Character(s), Markus/North (Detroit: Become Human), Original Female Character(s)/Original Male Character(s), Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Kudos: 2





	1. S1E1: Old Wounds [1/3]

One of the biggest questions put forth by mankind is whether or not we’re alone in the universe - whether or not our world’s science fiction depicting the existence extraterrestrial life is indeed true. In fact it’s such a popular and widely-speculated question that it’s become one of the main defining characteristics of ourselves as a species: curiosity regarding the unknown and the things that lay beyond our current reach.

In the year 2058, the Human race made a revolutionary achievement in the field of space travel by inventing the warp engine, which allows the spacecraft it’s installed on to travel faster than the speed of light and therefore go over a much larger distance in a smaller amount of time, and this new development inspired the Humans to then reach out into space via their communication technologies of the time with a message of peace, hoping for it to be received by aliens if such a thing did even exist.

Sure enough, it was only two months later when, after making a response to this message, a species of offworlders called the Xelayans made direct contact on Earth, led by their planet’s High Chancellor, a philanthropic and well-liked woman named Dealdra Lezar; they’re almost physically indistinguishable from Humans on the outside except for having pointed ears which stick out horizontally from their heads, and another clear difference is that they have ten times the physical strength of the latter. The Human representative who met with her, United States President Gene Baxter, was also a popular figure amongst his own people and had led his country, and helped to lead Earth as a whole, through the Brand New Renaissance, which began in 2045.

From there, the Xelayans and Humanity formed an alliance, where the latter were introduced to the Voldorians, a cat-like race from a marshland-dominated planet, and then later the three species made contact with the Zolans, peaceful people with vertical pointed ears clinging to the sides of their heads and the latest of the four to have developed their own warp technology. And then finally, on November 12th in 2079, the alliance formed between the Humans, the Xelayans, the Voldorians and the Zolans culminated in them forming what would later become one of the most powerful and widely-known interplanetary powers in the galaxy: the Planetary Union, a partnership where the four all coexisted in harmony under one main government and promised to look after each other and uphold their societies’ prosperity together.

More and more species joined the Planetary Union as other members over time after this year in which it was founded, to the point where it currently consists of sixteen different member races including the four founders and androids, which Humanity had first created back in the early 2030s, and it had still been true to its word ever since that day in 2079. Every member species was treated with tons of respect and tolerance and although it was currently in a Cold War-like conflict with a subjugation-based alien power called the Romulan Star Empire and also at odds with a xenophobic one called the Windermere Kingdom, it’s fair to say that the Union was continuing to do very well for itself. On every member planet, both the colonial ones and the species homeworlds, most diseases and conditions were eradicated, such as cancer. Every individual was treated as equals regardless of gender, species, skin colour or sexual orientations. They had a thriving and powerful fleet of starships co-ordinated and managed by an organisation within the Union called the United Interstellar Fleet Agency, which was most often shortened down to the UIFA and was a NASA successor of sorts. Poverty and dictatorial regimes were all but gone, meaning that every single country on Earth was a free one. They had a rather hefty supply of Dirilium, a regenerative crystalline element with the chemical symbol Drm-Δ which was the main fuel source of the warp engine due to its emissions of Delta radiation and which exists in numerous deposits of various sizes across the galaxy.

I could go on, but my point is that this society, as you might have guessed by now, was a utopian one.

_NEW YORK_

_UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, EARTH_

**_2276 AD_ **

Lady Liberty still stood tall and proud after all the centuries of her existence, being dwarfed somewhat by the giant and glittering skyscrapers around her off in the distance - the most notable of which being the city’s UIFA headquarters, Union Command New York (or UCNY) - but nonetheless maintaining her mighty reign over the area.

A young Human woman wearing a grey backpack emerged out of the lift she’d been standing in now that its doors had slid open upon reaching her desired floor: she was a UIFA starship officer and as a result she usually didn’t get that much time to be there, but her residence at the moment on her homeworld of Earth was a beautiful flat in a complex near to Liberty Island, where she was also living with her boyfriend. She knew that this boyfriend, who was a fellow officer posted on a different starship to hers, had just had the last week off while his was undergoing routine repairs in orbit and was due to additionally have the next one off as his and his crewmates’ shore leave. She had decided to return home to their flat as well and surprise him, her own ship having just come to receive the same kind of updates and therefore providing her and her own crewmates with their own time for shore leave.

Her mouth turned into an involuntary smile at the fact that she was not only about to see him again in person but was additionally going to have a week off with him, and this matched her already confident strides through the corridor. Whilst walking, she passed some of her neighbours and gave them waves and pleasantries until she’d reached the door to the flat, which was automatic just like those of the others in the complex.

However, nothing could have prepared her for the sight she was instantly greeted with once she walked through this door.

There, in the living room with a large floor-length window taking up most of the wall on the left and a medium dinner table and a yucca plant, was her boyfriend, in the process of cuddling and sharing kisses with another woman on the sofa.

This sofa was faced away from the door, so they hadn’t seen her enter yet, and they were most likely so wrapped up in what they were doing that they didn’t notice the quiet sound of the door opening either. Her lower lip fell open by a few degrees and her eyes went wide, not sure whether to be shocked or just incensed. Then finally, after a few more painful seconds of watching the sight in front of her, she spoke. Well, I say ‘spoke’ but come to think of it I believe what I actually mean is ‘shouted’.

“ _What_. The actual **_hell_**?!”

She didn’t think she’d never seen a person move so quickly: both her boyfriend and the other woman he was with turned around to face her, confusion on the latter’s face and surprise on his.

“Oh Christ.” He sat stock-still and said this to himself in dread, with his own wide eyes.

“So this is what you’ve been doing when I’m not around then is it?” Said the newcomer incredulously.

“Wait, are you his girlfriend?” The other woman, evidently a member of another Union member race called the Orions based on the fact that she had green skin, asked.

“Yes, I am! Or at least I thought I was, anyway!”

The Orion woman turned back to look at him with slowly growing disbelief. “You told me you were single!”

“It’s alright, he obviously lied to both of us.” The newcomer said to her while shaking her head at the male.

“That’s it, I’m out of here.” The Orion swiftly got up from the sofa and walked past the Human woman and out of the door.

“Me too.”

“Wait come on you two I can explain all this!” The boyfriend went after them into the corridor, with the two women both going in separate directions.

“No, there’s nothing to explain! In fact, you looked like you were having fun so why don’t you just go after her instead?” The Human snapped back, trying to pick up her pace in order to make him stop pursuing her down the hall.

“I swear Jen, please I just need one minute tops.” He pleaded with her helplessly as they were now nearing the elevator she’d come out of a minute ago.

“I said no! I came back home to be with you here, because I was going to be happy to see you and I thought you were going to be happy to see me, too, and I instead walk in to find you basically cheating. Well you know what? You don’t deserve an explanation. We’re over, end of story. Sod you, Martin.” She hissed as she walked back into the lift and the doors slid shut behind her. As soon as it begun the descent back towards the ground floor, she leaned against the back wall and looked up towards the lift’s ceiling with a million emotions running through her head, while her now former boyfriend used one of his hands to grip the bridge of his nose in despair.

_ONE MONTH LATER_

Admiral Bruce Sullivan’s office door chime in San Francisco, at the main UIFA headquarters overall called Union Command Central, rang from the outside while he was sat at his desk, reviewing some reports on the computer screen in front of him.

“Come in.” The angle and position the computer was at allowed him to use it if he wished but without blocking out whoever would sit in one of the three white chairs in front of the desk.

The door a few feet away proceeded to open, revealing the same Human woman who’d had an unsavoury surprise about a month beforehand. She had piercing blue eyes and long mousy-brown hair which went halfway down her back, with a light royal blue dyed streak at the front on her head’s left side, and wore a pair of glasses with thin black frames. “You wanted to see me?”

“Yeah that’s right; have a seat.” The female one out of the two Humans, whose name was Jenna Kaufmann and who was the First Officer of the U.S.S _Zephyr_ , approached his desk and sat down in the middle one of the three chairs. They both wore the same type of uniform, due to them both being officers working for the UIFA, but with different colours and rank indications: while Bruce’s jacket was a purple one with three stars each on both of the rank bars on his shoulders and with a gold-rimmed insignia of the Planetary Union seal on the jacket’s left breast area, Jenna’s own jacket was blue with three thin vertical rectangles on the shoulder bars, indicative of the Commander rank, and the left breast insignia of the same Union seal had grey rims instead of gold. This was because of the ranks and occupation divisions they belonged to, which can be explained via this key:

"I've got some good news for you, Jen." The Admiral began. "If you wanna accept it, there's an Exploratory-class ship available for you to command: it's this mid-level thing so it's not exactly as much of a big deal as some of the other Exploratories like the _Abeona_ , but I know how you've been angling for the commanding officer position for a while and this ship's in need of a new one 'cause the last Captain's just been transferred to a space station."

"Really?" Her eyes went marginally wide in surprise, although this time it was a pleasant one. "Hang on, did someone put you up to this? Is this meant to be some kind of elaborate prank?" Jenna chuckled lightly. She and Bruce had a long-standing friendship from back when she was only a Cadet and still learning, with it causing him to become a mentor-like figure to her in the process, and with all friendships came the possibility of being tricked every now and then.

"I promise this isn't a prank." Bruce, also smiling in return, shook his head and assured her to the contrary. "It's called the U.S.S _Valkyrie_."

"Okay... wow." She wasn't entirely sure how to put what she was thinking into words now that what had been her lifelong dream had evidently come true at last. "Is there anything else I need to know? Like if there are any other positions on this ship missing or if there are any heads up I need to be given about the crew, that sort of thing?"

"The other people needed to fill it in are the First, Chief Medical, Communications and Second officers but from what I've been told I think they're working on those four."

The one with the partially dyed hair immediately had an idea. "If it's alright with you and the rest of the higher-ups, I'd like to appoint Eve and Hank as the CMO and Second Officer, in that order."

"Okay, I think that'll technically be fine, but I can't promise that _all_ of the others here won't have reservations about Hank. I mean do you remember that incident last year?" The male cringed slightly to himself at the detailed memories of it.

"I do - it's basically been _burned_ onto my memory." Jenna briefly looked off into the distance as she, too recalled it: Hank had gotten into an argument with his ship's Captain the previous year and it had subsequently caused him to be given a reprimand after what he did next. "A man drawing a... shall we say a certain _appendage_ on the back of the Captain's chair on the bridge is hardly something you tend to forget easily." She turned to look at the Admiral again, pushing this memory aside for now. "But the thing is, he might be a bit outspoken when someone rubs him up the wrong way but he's still been a good friend to both of us and he still has some integrity, so I think he deserves this chance, Bruce."

He nodded in understanding. "So you're saying you're ready for this?"

"Being the Captain of a starship is what I've been dreaming of since I was a pre-teen; it's been my life ambition, so for you to make me a Captain, at the age of twenty-five I might add, is... just amazing. So yes, it's a definite yes." She said. "I am ready."

The space orbiting Earth was, as always, alive with the many starships coming in and out of it, whether they were simply orbiting on their own or docked with one of the two rather big space stations. There were different classes for their purposes, such as Flagship-class ones being the leaders of the Planetary Union's fleet as a whole and the ones best suited for heavy combat, with the most important ship overall out of every single one of them in the fleet as a whole being the U.S.S _Asgard_ , while Exploratory-class referred to ships designed for exploration and sometimes running errands for the UIFA. Cargo-class ships, as usual, to reiterate, were bringing in material resources from the other member worlds such as lumber and fruit from Voldor and perfume and jewellery from Zalmara Prime, the homeworld of a pale-skinned member race with white eyes and temple ridges called the Arkadans, who were well-known for being the Union's main supplier of luxury goods which also included hair lotions, satin fabric and exotic wines. Transport-class ships ferried passengers to and from the various worlds, and the Colonial-class ones, with the name once again speaking for itself, transported families and researches to and from established lunar and planetary colonies.

"So you've been promoted to Captain?" Said Dr. Eve Ferencz, another female Human with a lighter shade of blue eyes whose long blonde hair was a frizzy mass held in place behind her head and shoulders by a thin black headband.

"Yep." Responded Jenna proudly as she and this blonde, who was older than her by about one year, were standing in a shuttle on their way over to this new ship Jenna was now the leader of. This pair had not only advanced their careers in the UIFA together (and also their similar tastes in music and 21st century Japanese anime) but had also played and grown up together during their childhoods, living in the same rural village in Warwickshire, England.

"Since you're twenty-five that means you've gotta be the youngest Captain in decades or something." Commented the other officer Jenna and the Admiral had been talking about, Lieutenant-Commander Hank Anderson, the one who was currently piloting the shuttle. He was a man in his early fifties who was perhaps one of Bruce's oldest friends, with a deep voice, jaw-length grey hair and a full beard and, like Jenna and Eve, blue eyes, and he added to the range of diversity in nationalities out of these three in the shuttle: Hank, additionally like Bruce, was an American, Eve was Hungarian and Jenna, meanwhile, was a mix of two: her mother was English, and her father was from Austria.

"Apparently there was this one bloke at roughly about the start of the century who did it at the age of twenty-four, so y- hang on." This biracial one of the trio stopped in mid sentence due to her suddenly noticing something that Hank was holding in one of his hands. "Is that beer?"

"No, it's whisky." This object he was holding, which he'd just taken a sneaky swig out of, was a UIFA-issue silver cylindrical flask.

"You're drinking whisky right now?" Eve raised her eyebrows slightly.

"What? It's a new ship, I've gotta do _something_ to psych myself up."

"It's literally 11:30 in the morning." The blonde internally sighed to herself.

"Eve's right, give it to me." Jenna held her hand out to take it.

"No!"

"I'm serious Hank, hand it over."

"No! Jesus Jen, it's just a little whisky, I know not to drink so much of the stuff that I'm drunk while piloting-" He, too, was abruptly cut off as he had to manouvre the shuttle quickly - during Jenna's attempt to take the flask off of him and the response he just gave, the three had failed to notice another incoming shuttle in front of them, which they hurriedly swerved under just in the nick of time. "Okay..." Hank commented to himself quietly and he awkwardly looked back out in front of him afterwards, with it now being the half-Briton's turn to raise her eyebrows.

Within the seconds that followed afterwards, they finally arrived at the U.S.S _Valkyrie_ , sitting in a relatively remote docking port off of one of the space stations. She might not have been a particularly large or overly impressive ship, but she wasn't small either and was still a sight to behold; she had twin warp nacelles at the back and an immaculate white-coloured outer hull with an ever so slight, almost unnoticeable blue tint, the typical design for the Union ships originating from Earth. On this outer hull, at the front, were the words ' **U.S.S VALKYRIE** ' with its registry, **_'_ XLV-169**' in smaller writing underneath, and, in addition, on a portion of the outer side of the left warp nacelle was ' **PLANETARY UNION** '. While the three letters were just chosen at random, the numbers on a Union ship's registry were meant to indicate decreasing order of importance with higher numbers: for example, the total number of starships belonging to the Union as a whole was currently a little bit over seven hundred and fifty, and the Asgard's number as the most important of them all was 001.

"It’s good to be meeting you all and to have been made your Captain.” Jenna, in the _Valkyrie_ ’s shuttle bay, addressed the rest of what was now her crew, which was somewhere around the near vicinity of two hundred and fifty people. While Hank and Eve were standing by her side, these two hundred and fifty-ish others were in front of her, stood to attention in neat rows. “My hope is that you’ll find this ship to be an enjoyable workplace and one that you’re happy to be serving on, but also that it’ll still be tightly ran and have a sense of professionalism.” She gave a nod of her head to them along with a polite smile. “Everyone else except for the senior officers is dismissed.”

With that, everyone in front of her and her pair of friends began to move around the room, the majority leaving to go to their stations while the senior officers, the most important crew members such as the heads of departments, got together in the middle of the bay to form a line with them all next to each other and with their hands behind their backs.  
  
“Alright, first up is Lieutenant-Commander North, our Chief Engineer.” The bespectacled Human glanced down at the data pad in her left hand to remind herself of these senior officers' names and jobs on the ship, and then looked up at the one in front of her. North was an android, based not only on the personnel files from the data pad but also by the fact that her uniform jacket had a blue armband on the right upper arm, and she had brown eyes with long strawberry-brown hair that was draped over her left shoulder in a low plait. "You know, there's a report from your last Captain here detailing the kind of repair work you've done and overseen and, honestly, I must say it's impressive."

"Thanks ma'am, it's nice you think so." North, although she didn't have an actual nationality due to this above fact that she was an android, seemed to possess an American accent and gave a small smile at the compliment. "I'll try to still be the best tech support you can get." She joked.

Jenna laughed to herself. "And I'll try to be lenient on you with the situations that just require the question 'Have you tried turning it off and on again?'" She moved along down the line slightly and took another glance downwards at the pad. "Next is Lieutenant Andrea Kitan, our Chief of Security." The officer she turned her head back upwards to look at this time was a woman a couple of inches taller than herself who was the only one wearing a red uniform out of everybody in the room, with green eyes of a shade so bright they almost glittered and long dark brown hair with small twin braids at the front, and with the lower half dyed red and fading upwards into its natural colour. Her ears, which were currently wearing diamond studs, were pointed and sticking out horizontally from her head like that of a Xelayan, which made sense as according to her personnel file, Lieutenant Kitan was a half Xelayan-half Human hybrid. It was bound to be lowered down a little bit but this still meant she obviously had at least some of the former's super strength. "This is just a question out of curiosity, but I noticed that you have the same surname: do you have any relation to Eisad Kitan, that Xelayan Ambassador?"

"That's right - Ambassador Kitan's my dad." Andrea nodded her head, responding to Jenna with her own courteous smile. "But I don't mean to say I want any special treatment because of that, ma'am, I'd just like to let my own merits speak for themselves if that's okay." Her own accent seemed to be a mostly French but with some British thrown into the mix as well.

"Yeah, that's perfectly fine, no worries." The Captain took another look down and another move along. "Lieutenant Markus, our Navigator." This crewmember was another android, based on both the file and his own jacket's blue armband, and he had tan skin, very short dark brown hair and, curiously, two differently-coloured eyes, his left being green and the right being blue. The equivalent in Humans and most other humanoids was known as heterochromia, but it was unusual for such a thing to exist in androids unless their designers had deliberately implemented it, so Jenna had to take another second to look at him and make sure she wasn't just seeing things. "From what I understand you're the one out of the senior officers who's been serving on the _Valkyrie_ for the longest, aren't you?"

"That's right ma'am, welcome aboard." Nodded Markus, who sounded like he had the had the same accent as North.

"It also says here that before you came to this ship you spent a little bit of time serving on another Exploratory-class ship, the U.S.S _Rhiannon_ , so I've got to ask because it's just this little rumour that's going round: is it true that on there the senior officers annually do a prank at some point where one of them wakes up in the ship's environmental simulator, and the characters in it have arrested them for indecent exposure or something?"

"I've been talked into taking part in a few of them before, so I know that they have to make the arrest charge in the simulation different every year so that it's not just the same joke every time, but yes, that rumour is true." The heterochromatic crewmember chuckled fondly at the memories. "The indecent exposure one was the latest earlier this year, from what the _Rhiannon_ 's crew told me; the whole thing started out as just one prank to 'initiate' the new Communications Officer years ago, apparently, and it kind of turned into a tradition onboard from there."

"Remind us not to get on your bad side, Lieutenant." Eve, who was standing with Hank behind Jenna, remarked in jest, causing the latter to look down at the floor and grin at the thought of the _Rhiannon_ crew's shenanigans. "Lieutenant-Commander Connor, our Science Officer." This one, the only one in the line who was wearing a green uniform, was another android, and out of the three he was the only one with a small circular disk known as an LED embedded into his right temple - all androids were "born", so as to speak, with this LED, but they could remove it laer if they wanted. Connor, a man with neat, short dark brown hair and brown eyes, appeared to be the only one out of the three androids who still had his own LED. Also, a small strand of his hair dangled down onto the left side of his forehead, seemingly a quirk of his otherwise tidy appearance. "It says in your own personnel file that a few months ago you published a research paper on theories about Delta radiation decay, that's a great achievement."

"Thank you, ma'am. Although others in the field of science have made more notable contributions before my own was published, so it isn't what you'd usually regard as prominent research." He said, with another American accent to match Markus and North's.

"It's still a good research contribution all the same even if it's not that widely-known; as long as you're in the pursuit of the universe's truths, that's basically all that truly matters in the end when it comes to science." Replied Jenna.

Connor nodded his head, agreeing that what she was saying was right.

"And finally, Lieutenant Arthur Doyle, our Helmsman." This last one in the line was a Human, clean-cut in appearance similarly to Connor, and he, too, had brown eyes but his brown hair was of a somewhat lighter shade. His hair was, like that of the other men in the line, short, with it mostly being combed but a little bit messy in places and with some of it dangling between his eyes as a sort of fringe. "All these piloting manouvres listed in your own file... these are just amazing, frankly. These are enough to get you stationed on the big-shot ships like the U.S.S _Olympia_ or the _Vanir_ , or maybe even the _Asgard_ : what are you doing on a midle-of-the-road ship?"

"I was stationed on a Flagship-class starship about nearly a decade ago, but a few years after I started there a chance to transfer to a different class of ship came up and I decided I wanted to stretch myself a little bit, you know? I wanted to do something a bit different." Arthurs accent, like that of his new Captain herself, was a British one.

"I see. Fair enough, I like a change of pace every now and then as much as the next man." Said Jenna.

"Also, sorry, could I make a request?"

"Fire away."

"Well, our last Captain here used to let me have a swig of non-alcoholic cider sometimes while I was on duty on the bridge, so I was just wondering whether that's alright with you as well, if it's not too much trouble. It's alright if it's not, though." He seemed to be a little bit hesitant about bringing the question up to a new commanding officer, which was also shown by him nervously looking off at the side for half of a second once he was done speaking.

"Yeah, yeah, that should be fine as long as you just keep it underneath your desk and you don't spill any of it." Jenna answered cordially.

"Cheers, ma'am." Arthur nodded in gratitude.

"Right then, everyone get yourselves settled in, and then we'll get going at fourteen hundred this afternoon." She declared to everyone, and the five in the line who she'd just gotten introduced to began to make their way out of the shuttle bay and go on their way to their respective quarters, with Arthur and Andrea going together and talking along the way due to the fact that they were, in fact, boyfriend and girlfriend. Jenna, too, walked out with Eve and Hank.

The crewmembers who'd already been serving onboard the _Valkyrie_ prior to Hank, Eve and Jenna's arrival obviously had less to do in this portion of downtime they had before 2 PM, but the others who had, like the trio, only just been transferred over took the beginning of this time to start unpacking in their quarters. The only recently-arrived person apart from the non-senior crewmembers was Connor, who took out, among other things, the photo of his class' graduation years ago from the UIFA Academy he attended as well as the copies he owned of the novels _The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow_ and _The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde_. Meanwhile, Jenna and Hank settled in with their respective pet dogs, the Samoyed named Everest and the Saint Bernard named Sumo, both male, providing rubs in various places on their bodies and reminding them that they were, indeed, good boys. In her own quarters, Andrea had to gently pick up her female cat with jet-black fur, Nightshade, and put her down due to her having just been sitting on her desk, in front of the computer screen.

The door chime to Connor's rang.  
"Come in."

The door opened from the outside, allowing none other than Eve to enter. "Hi."

"Hello, Doctor." The Science Officer looked up from his bag, which was neatly placed down on the sofa, and smiled politely while the door slid shut again behind his newcomer. "Is there something I can do for you?"

"I thought since I'm the CMO and you're basically the ship's main scientist, our jobs are going to cause us to be working together on quite a few things here, so we should get to know each other a bit better.” Said Eve. 

He nodded; her reasoning did sound valid enough. "I understand that."

"Eve Ferencz." She introduced her name, stepped forward towards him and offered one of her hands.

"It's a pleasure, Doctor." Connor used one of his own to shake this hand of hers. "I'm curious, from what I've noticed so far, you seem to be close to Lieutenant-Commander Anderson and Captain Kaufmann - have you known them for long?"

"For Hank, about eight years now, but me and Jen have been friends for somewhere around twenty."

"You and her must be childhood friends." He deduced, based on this time window she'd just mentioned along with her current age, which he'd found out via her own personnel file to be twenty-six.

"Yeah. When you're in a primary school playground you tend to instantly start searching for one of the available kids to play hopscotch with and you just go from there." Eve smiled to herself. Her and Jenna's young misadventures were a long string of combined chaos which, for most of it, she could only remember brief snippets of now, which made it all the more humorous, like a compilation of nothing but the most madcap parts. "But to be serious, she can sometimes be a little socially awkward with men but she's a good friend, and he's a bit sarcastic but so is Hank once you get to know him."

"Thanks, I look forward to getting to work with them and the others. My new posting here will allow me to meet new people and adapt my own social skills." Said the android.

"Well, I've got to go now - I need to finish some more of my unpacking and then go to check out Sickbay and get that sorted out. It was nice talking with you, Connor."

"And you as well, Dr. Ferencz."

Eve then turned around and made her way back towards the door, but turned her head back towards him while halfway through it. "See you later."

As she then fully left his quarters, Connor felt glad that so far he was doing what he hoped to accomplish: successfully getting along well with his new crewmates.

When the time came at 2 PM for the ship to leave for its first mission with Jenna in command, she walked onto the bridge to see that Arthur, Connor, Andrea and Markus were already assembled there: Markus and Arthur were respectively on the right and left side in front of her at the desk which was the closest towards the bridge's solid glass viewscreen at the front of the ship, and Andrea and Connor respectively on her left and right at the sides of the room. And there, directly in the middle of the room's entirety, were the First Officer's and Captain's chairs next to each other, respectively on her left and her right. Bands of white light sat above the chairs and desks, embedded into the walls and circling around the room, with a slightly thicker blue light band above it doing the same and with another solid window of glass sitting in the middle of the ceiling.

Only a few moments after the new Captain had arrived on the bridge was when Hank did the same, sitting down at the Second Officer station on Connor's side of the room; out of the pairs on the two sides, Andrea was closest to the front of the bridge on hers, and on his and Connor's side, Hank was the closer one to the front. The only other chair in the room which currently didn't have anyone onboard to sit in it, apart from that of the First Officer, was the Communcations Officer station, but the aforementioned Human woman with the glasses remembered that the UIFA higher-ups were still working on that, and she was due to get confirmation on who her First Officer would be at any moment.

"We've just received word that we're now cleared for departure, ma'am." Andrea informed her.

"Thank you Lieutenant, tell them we're all ready and good to go." Responded Jenna, finding herself relishing the subconscious sensation that ran through her brain and spine when she sat down in the Captain's chair. "Our mission is a simple one: delivering supplies to one of the colony planets. Lieutenants Doyle and Markus, set a course for Epsilon-Iota and take us out, slow and steady."

"Departing the dockyard now." Said Arthur, pushing down fractionally on the silver lever on the top of his desk which was in his right hand. As soon as he did so, the _Valkyrie_ moved forwards out of the now opened-up docking arms from the space station which had previously been gripping it, in full view of the station's windows on either side. The area around the ship gradually began to widen out as it moved, eventually into nothing but open space around it, providing an ample amount of room for the Exploratory-class starship to fly as freely as possible.

"We've fully cleared the dockyard, and the course is laid in." Reported Markus, after typing on a few of the button functions on his own area of the desk at the front.

"Engage the warp drive, Mr. Doyle."

"Aye ma'am." The brown-eyed Briton, smiling at the same time now that he and his crewmates were back in action, pressed a few of his own desk buttons. "Warp drive engaged."

Within seconds, the faint humming sound of this engine powering up had grown into a louder version, after which the ship jumped to warp, leaving behind the space around Earth altogether.


	2. S1E1: Old Wounds [2/3]

The _Valkyrie_ sailed through open space at beyond the speed of light, meaning the countless stars around it were appearing through the windows as blends of white blurs and mostly white but slightly blue-tinted and nearly transparent dust. Whenever the ship was only using the normal impulse engines, the ambient hum of it moving through the space outside was almost unnoticeable, but while flying at warp speed, though, this ambient noise was fractionally louder.

"Captain, there’s a message that’s just come in from Admiral Sullivan: he’s sent us the personnel file of the chosen First Officer and says that they’re ready to be picked up from Thurisaz Station." Andrea, reading the screen beneath her fingers at her desk, reported.

"That's good, Thurisaz Station's only about five minutes out of our way from what I remember." Jenna acknowledged. "Who is it?"

"I'm sending the file over to your personal data pad, ma'am. It should come through any second now..." The Security Chief responded, typing away on the buttons at this desk of hers before stopping again a few moments later.

Sure enough, the pad Jenna was holding in one of her hands seemed to have just received it. "Thanks." However, almost straight away after she'd looked down at the personnel file of her to-be second in command, she felt herself sigh internally in surprise, some of the colour involuntarily drained out of her face and her lower jaw grew somewhat limp. "Lieutenant Kitan, are you sure this is the same file that Admiral Sullivan sent you...?"

"It is the exact same, ma'am, I'm certain of it. Why?" Andrea's eyebrows quirked as she turned around halfway to face the younger woman, wondering what the expression of shock was all about.

"Oh no... you _git_ Bruce..." The Captain hissed to herself, before she slowly rose up from her chair and walked out of the room, although it only took one moment before the walking pace had escalated into a run. She had a call she needed to make to Union Command Central straight away. "No no no no no no no no no _no no no no no_..."

The hybrid who'd been speaking to her fully turned around, her and the others on the bridge looking between each other for any kind of hint amongst them that they knew what had brought on this reaction, but the faces of Hank, Arthur, Connor and Markus all looked just as perplexed as her own.

" _Why_ have you done this to me?! I mean Jesus, of all the Commanders you could've picked, why did it have to be _Martin_?!" Jenna shouted at the large wall-mounted screen behind her desk in her quarters, upon which the Admiral was being displayed sitting in his own office back on Earth. His own short, combed hair was dark brown with some grey areas and small sideburns, along with his eye colour being brown.

"Because he's the only available one near enough to the _Valkyrie_ 's location right now, and plus, when we ran your own personnel file through a computer program with the ones of something like a dozen different Commanders, he got the highest skillset compatibility score with you compared to all of the others." He answered, trying to calm down the woman on the other end of the call line.

"Oh, really? Well can your compatibility test go back in time and stop him from cheating on me with some stranger?" She retorted.

"Jen, you really do need to just take a breather for a sec." This time, she did indeed manage to calm herself enough to stop and listen to what he wanted to say after taking a moment to do so. "Martin was actually the one who _requested_ this posting, too, and I know it's not ideal - hell, I would've been feeling the same way if one of my ex-girlfriends had just turned up on my ship after a breakup - but sometimes you've just gotta roll with what gets thrown at you as best as you can."

"I know... God, this is a bloody nightmare, Bruce..." She groaned as she placed most of the fingers from both of her hands except for her thumbs onto her forehead.

"Look, I have no idea how you two are gonna go on from here, 'cause I don't have the answers for everything, but I'm telling you this as your friend: you two have gotta work something out or fix things with each other at least a little if you want your _Valkyrie_ commanding officer posting to run smoothly. Because you two are gonna be seeing a lot of each other, on a daily basis." Bruce told her, his tone being that of a cross between firm advice and consolation but predominantly the latter.

Within another few minutes, the arrival at Thurisaz Station had come. These stations belonging to the Planetary Union were all named after Nordic runes except for the ones orbiting planets, like the docking station above Earth that the ship had departed from, meaning this rune-related naming system only applied to those that existed in open space - it was similar to the Greek alphabet-based naming system that their colony planets used, where the system name came first and then the planet number. For example, Epsilon-Iota was named this way because it was in what had been dubbed as the Epsilon System, and because it was the system's ninth planet from the sun and Iota was the ninth letter in the Greek alphabet.

"North to bridge." There came the Chief Engineer's voice through the small communication panel mounted into the top of the right armrest on the Captain's chair, its twin being in the left one for the First Officer chair.

"Go ahead." Jenna pressed a button on this right panel.

"I'm in the transporter room, and Commander Keates has just arrived onboard." Said North.

"Could you tell him to report straight to my quarters, please?"

"Aye ma'am."

"Kaufmann out." The Human pressed the same button again and got up, this time moving at a calmer pace, towards the turbolift at the end of the corridor outside of the bridge. The dread in her mind had already been causing her to spend the last few minutes experiencing the infamous butterfly sensation in the pit of her belly, but now that he was actually onboard this same ship as her, this sensation had solidified itself and grown in intensity.

"The Captain seems to be displeased at the arrival of the new executive officer." Connor observed once she'd left, confused at this very point he'd just brought up.

"He's her ex-boyfriend." Said Hank.

"You know him, sir?" Enquired Markus, him and Arthur both turning around towards him in curiosity.

"Yeah. He used to be my friend, too, at least until 'bout a month ago when she ended things with him - apparently she walked in to find him cheating on her."

"Sheesh. That's cold." Arthur commented.

"That's what I said too." Replied the grey-haired Second Officer. "So... yep, this is definitely gonna be a fun trip for all of us..."  
  


Jenna herself, meanwhile, was sitting at her desk in the office section of her quarters, resting both of her arms on it with the thumb and index finger of her left hand holding her lips anxiously, until the door chime rang. "Come in." She finally managed to bring herself to say it after a few seconds of silence.

And then, with one simple opening of a door, there he was. Martin Keates was a currently thirty-one year old and generally handsome-looking American man with his own pair of black-rimmed glasses, whose rims were marginally thicker than Jenna’s. He had bright brown eyes, with short hair was dark brown in colour and had several side and back cowlicks here and there despite the rest of it generally appearing to be neat; it

covered a large majority of his right eye, and was formed into a subtle mullet haircut on the back of his neck. Another thing about him was that he was rather tall - he stood at six feet and four inches in terms of height, two inches taller than Hank - and had a slender body build. He was carrying a dark grey duffel bag, with the strap over his left shoulder.  
  
Unsure on what exactly to say right now as he fully entered into the room, he eventually settled on, “Hi.” 

“Afternoon.” Jenna responded, albeit hesitantly again.   
  
Noticing this arrival, Everest promptly got up from the corner of the room where he's just been sitting in a curled up position, making a beeline for Martin with his snowy white tail wagging the entire way. He hadn't seen this person before him for months, and as they'd been gradually growing attached to each other, the first thing on the Samoyed's mind was that he was owed a lot of belly rubs and head pats in return for the mysterious absence.

"Hey boy." Martin, smiling, gladly fulfilled this unspoken request by scratching and stroking the dog behind his ears, before addressing the other Human again, "Congrats on your promotion."

She nodded, slowly. "Maybe now that you're apparently my First Officer you'd like a full report sent to you this evening on, you know, the _exact words_ that were said to me and perhaps also a record of how many times today Everest has licked his lips?" Her slightly wide eyes and the way she was smiling right now made her displeasure with him very clear. "Or do you want me to check in on the precise whereabouts of that Orion bird of yours?"

Her dog went off back to his corner again, while the male Human's expression was all but deadpan. "Are you done?"

"Possibly, possibly not, who can tell?" Shrugged Jenna.

"I know it's hard for you to move past it, but what I did is the worst thing I've ever done - I've spent this last month with nothing but the memories of that day taking up my thinking every hour I'm awake - and I swear, I can't apologise enough to you, Jen. So that's why I'm here: when I heard there was an executive officer position available on the _Valkyrie_ and that you were onboard too, I wanted to do something to make it up to you."

"That's all well and good, but the thing is, I was almost ready to get over it and forget the entire thing. And then when I found out you were going to be showing up here it just brought back all those unpleasant thoughts about us." She stood up from her chair and walked out in front of it, now standing in front of one of the windows and still directly facing him. "Sometimes when I close my eyes I can still see flashes of you and her sitting there, kissing on our sofa. I thought we had a relationship that was based on _trust_ , Martin!" 

"Oh yeah? Well I thought it was supposed to be one where _both_ members value their dates and their time together! There were times when I hardly even saw you!" He snapped back. "Wherever we were living, you basically just treated it like some kind of base camp - you were in and out more times than I can remember! It was always some new assignment for you to advance yourself in the ranks, some new way to climb up that tiny little bit higher on the UIFA's ladder. At least Tharela was there for me because you _weren't_!" 

"Don't you ever stop to think _why_ I did all those things to 'climb up that tiny little bit higher', as you put it?" Said Jenna, her temper rising. "I did it for _us_ : God only knows which ships we could've been stationed on and how far away from each other they could be - as a Captain I'd get to decide who's on my ship and who isn't, including letting us be together that way!" 

"Was it really for us? Or just for _you_ , Jen?"

"I could ask you the same bloody thing! Was that cheating business with Tharela _really_ because of our issues, or was it just the result of you developing a two-birds-one-stone attitude anyway?" 

"You know, I was feeling on edge about seeing you again; I was dreading you'd shut me out and not take my reasons and the things I'd have to say seriously. Thanks for proving me right." Martin's lips tightened into a scowl, before he immediately proceeded to turn around and walk back out of the door and into the hall outside, leaving Jenna, who then went and slumped back down into her desk chair with a sigh, gripping her face in one hand.

The man she'd just been speaking to was now walking out into another corridor towards what was now apparently his quarters onboard the ship, his initial irritation at her slowly beginning to morph into a small burst of remorse and a general below-the-surface feeling of desire for things to be different. For the pair to have never been put into their current position with each other. He thought to himself about how he'd go about achieving this desire if he could, as in which specific events he'd undo: that fateful day a month beforehand where he was caught in the act was a must, he was as sure of that as he was of his own birthdate, but apart from this one he realised that the other options would be that little bit more difficult to choose from. If he was able to go right back to the root of the problem, then he could prevent his relationship with Jenna from ever happening in the first place and ultimately spare himself the pain and all the aggro which would come later, but another thing Martin then realised was that, in the end, he could most likely never bring himself to actually go ahead with rewriting this event. As much as he regretted the current situation between himself and Jenna, the memories of the happy days they spent together were still nonetheless precious to him.  
In this state of deep thought, though, he neglected to notice that Eve was coming in his direction down this same corridor, on her way to wherever she was currently headed.

"Hi Martin, it’s been a while." She said once they were now only a few feet apart from one another.

"Oh, hey." He returned the greeting after he did notice this around half a second later. "Looks like Jen’s made you the CMO." The tall male gestured towards her current getup, which, for all Chief Medical Officers on Union starships, was a green uniform jacket which was long enough to go down to the back of her knees, as a sort of lab coat, while every other officer’s jacket was always down to the hips - the standard length. This kind of job-specific uniform variation obviously made the Chief Medical Officers stand out from all of their crewmates. 

"I am, yeah; Hank’s the Second Officer here now as well." Replied Eve, before she managed to catch sight of the almost unnoticeable deep-in-thought look on his face which had been accompanying this actual mental state itself just a few moments ago. "Are you okay? You look like something’s up."

"Well... could I ask you something, as a friend?"

"Sure, what’s wrong?"

"The thing is, I’d just like to know whether you and me are still okay. I mean I know how after the breakup between me and her things with you and Hank were also a little... strained, so I wanna try and clear the air with you and him." Said Martin, slightly tentatively due to him internally cringing at the recollection of how his cheating had also damaged his friendships with this other pair.   
  
"You and me are fine! During the breakup I was _surprised_ at what had happened, but that’s about it." The Hungarian reassured him to the contrary in her own case. "I can’t make any promises about Hank, but I’m pretty much past it myself now."

He experienced a little dash of his own surprise. "You mean that?"

"I do - after some time I realised there was pretty much no point in holding on to the negativity and that the best thing to do is to keep on moving with the times and to try to do the same thing you’re doing now: fix things with you." She explained with a smile. 

"Thanks Eve, that’s great of you. It really makes me feel better." He found himself returning this same expression. "So you and me are good now?"

"Pretty much." Nodded the blonde. "So then, I suppose I'll be seeing you around?"

"Yeah, I'd better get going to unpack some of my stuff. See you." The pair then parted ways, continuing off in the directions they'd been heading prior to when the conversation kicked off, with Martin in particular feeling that little bit more relieved and satisfied in his mind now that he'd acquired at least some kind of positive closure.

It was several more minutes later when the _Valkyrie_ had reached its mission destination: planet Epsilon-Iota. The two planets to its left, Epsilon-Kappa and then Lambda, and the one on its right, Epsilon-Theta - which were all unsuitable for the lifeforms that take up the Union and were therefore uninhabited - were near enough to be seen in the sky from Iota's surface, adding a picturesque feel to the viewers of this particular sky, and the contrast in it made it feel a little bit ironic in a poetic manner: this thriving colony world with a population of thousands had a barren and inhospitable planet on either side.

"Entering orbit now." Reported Arthur, on the bridge.

"Lieutenant Kitan, tell the planet's research facility that we've arrived and we're ready to bring down their supplies as soon as they are." Said Martin.

"Aye sir." Andrea acknowledged, trying her best to ignore the high levels of unspoken friction originating from the centre of the room, where he and the Captain were sitting right next to each other and, apart from casting their eyes about on some occasions, were predominantly attempting to act as if the other didn't exist by not looking at each other. So far, this effort of the brunette to pay the tension no mind was failing.

"It's like you can cut this tension with a knife." The Briton who'd spoken previously before Martin, voicing what Andrea and most of the others on the bridge were just thinking, whispered to Markus.

"Just try not to make eye contact with them; think about something like a feel-good memory instead." This android recommended, soon after which Arthur had indeed managed to settle on one of these: the memory of him taking his shirt off one time when he got hot and sweaty in the ship's environmental simulator and the subsequent comments made about his chest by Andrea, who had walked in on him like that without being noticed.

"U.S.S _Valkyrie_ to Epsilon-Iota scientific institute, we've just entered orbit and we're ready to beam down with the supplies you asked for." The dark-haired female in the red uniform carried out the order she'd been given.

" _Valkyrie_ , this is Dr. Manya Chaudri, the institute's director. Could I speak with your Captain for a moment?" A feminine voice, seeming to be laced with an Indian accent, answered the message.

"Onscreen, Lieutenant." Jenna nodded to Andrea, who brought up the call's accompanying video image on the bridge's front viewscreen. "Dr. Chaudri, what can I help you with?"

Manya was a honey-skinned woman with immaculate polished nails, shoulder-length ebony hair in a bob cut and light brown eyes, appearing to currently be sitting at a desk in an office which was mostly white and grey in colour but not to the point where it was considered sickly as such, just businesslike. She was wearing the science facility's standard uniform, whose main item was a long, dark grey tunic jacket with lighter grey shoulders and the planet's seal, which was the Iota and Epsilon letters meshed together, on the front of the right shoulder area, and behind her off at the side was a hamster cage on a table, inside which a little orange ball of fluff that the bridge crew deduced to be her pet hamster was giving itself a wash. "The thing is, Captain, we don't actually need any supplies."

Understandably, Jenna and Martin both felt perplexed. "I don't understand... you requested for them yourself." The former replied.

"I know, I did. I'm sorry, it's just that I wouldn't have lied like that unless I had to. Come down to the surface and I'll explain everything there." She was visibly anxious about something, based on how she was using both of her hands to fiddle with the fingers on the other, but after she'd finished talking she pressed a button on her desk's keyboard and the call was ended.

"Weird..." Opined Martin on the director's behaviour.

"We'd better go." Said Jenna, as the pair got up from their seats and walked on their way out of the bridge. "Hank, you're in charge while we're gone, and Connor and Lieutenant Kitan, you two are with us."

"Did any of you guys see the hamster licking itself?" Asked Hank himself, once this four were gone.

"It was the very first thing I saw." Replied Arthur.

Jenna, Martin, Andrea, Connor and Eve soon materialised down on Epsilon-Iota's surface, in front of this scientific facility Manya worked for, by making use of one of the _Valkyrie_ 's two transporters designed for directly beaming people and objects to and from places without the need of a shuttle. Within seconds, every little white particle which had been circling the five during the beaming process had fully dissipated, fully marking their arrival. Eve, like all other UIFA Chief Medical Officers, had changed out of her long lab coat-like jacket and into a standard-length one for the away mission. 

"Dr. Chaudri." Greeted Jenna as she shook hands with Manya, who had just approached them from out of the institute's front doors. "I'm Jenna Kaufmann."

"Thank you for coming, Captain."

"This is my Security Chief, Andrea Kitan." The Austrian-Briton introduced, to which Andrea, too, then shook hands with Manya, and then so did the first-mentioned pair as their names were presented as well: "My Chief Medical Officer Eve Ferencz, Science Officer Connor, and my ex."

Martin shot a glare at the twenty-five year old, who was smiling smugly, before having his own turn at hand shaking. "Martin Keates, I'm her First Officer."

"I see." Said Manya with a nod.

"So, why did you bring us here?" He then asked the main question that was on his and the others' minds. "Why divert an on-duty starship?"

"Because we need protection from the Windermereans." It was physically unnoticeable, but as she said this, the _Valkyrie_ away team could tell that Dr. Chaudri was shuddering in her mind.

"The last time we saw there were no Windermeran ships in this area at all, it's too far into Union territory. What do they want from you here?" Asked Jenna, eyebrows quirking again.

"It'd probably be better if you saw firsthand. Come inside, I'll show you." Manya gestured over her shoulder with her hand, turned around and began walking back towards the facilty doors, now followed by the away team. Inside the gleaming complex were floors upon floors of laboratories and research equipment manned by scientists of numerous different member races from within the Union, such as Humans, androids, Xelayans, Zolans, Voldorians and even some members of the Yixli, horned people whose homeworld, Yixia VII, perpetually had a light and dark side due to a strange orbit around its sun and who had only developed their own warp technology about a decade prior. A couple of the other member species taking up the personnel were Kzarmiloids, slightly more technologically-advanced scaley humanoids with stripe-like markings across their necks, backs and shoulders, and Visterians, worm-like empaths who moved by floating through the air and had two whiskers on the sides of their heads for females with another on the top for males, and whose eyes were luminous in the dark.

"Fascinating..." Connor remarked to himself as he and the others walked past one of the botany labs, where a particular group of scientists were tending to a bush of yellow roses which seemed to be growing out of a smallish bed of metal.

"It’s solid titanium; the seeds of those roses were genetically modified before they were planted." Manya, smiling proudly, elaborated. "They had a specially-developed artificial gene spliced into their DNA last year which now, effectively, allows them to grow in any material - metals, woods, even glass and plastics, not just soil anymore. And the gene’s also been adapted to accelerate the growth, which is why it’s grown so much in just one year."

"It’s impressive research, Doctor." The Science Officer continued to gaze through the glass window in wonder at the work being done around the titanium-grown flowers. 

"Some of the botanists have even suggested the idea of someday modifying the gene even further to grow them in cardboard and other less solid materials like cotton and wool."

"Ambitions of being more and more adventurous never sleep." Commented Eve. "No wonder Epsilon-Iota’s known as one of the Union’s scientist playgrounds." 

"Exactly." Said Manya. "Where were we? Oh, yes, this way." Realising that they'd strayed away from the matter at hand, she afterwards continued off down the corridor with the five UIFA officers still following her, until they ultimately reached a room in the more technology-oriented section of that floor, where there were obviously much less plantlife and more strips of bright white light, which also cast soft blue tones of light around them and onto the edges of some of the many glass test tubes and scientific equipment being used by researchers around the room. "This is the lab where some of our researchers have recently been experimenting with temporal fields and how they can be controlled."

"Temporal? As in experiments with manipulating time?" Asked Andrea.

"That's right. The invention they've managed to create from that research is the project I've been supervising the most here." Manya, as she spoke, tapped a few buttons on a small keypad attached to the top of a round, white table which the six were now all gathered around, after removing from one of her pockets a banana and placing it on this table, underneath a device pointing down from the ceiling; it was light blue in colour and luminescent, and shaped like a triangular prism. "I believe I remember how to operate it..." Some more button taps later, the group around the table found themselves squinting slightly as this triangular prism-shaped object fired a thin, matching light blue stream of light out of its tip and down towards the banana, forming a bubble-like field around this fruit by a few inches while the away team seemed to notice that as the seconds went on, the banana seemed to be ageing rapidly, turning from yellow to a sickly black piece by piece. Once it was fully rotten, Manya pressed another button on the keypad and both the light beam and the field around the banana had disappeared completely, leaving only this now long-expired food item behind.

All five members of the away team raised their eyebrows to varying degrees.  
"That got interesting quickly." Eve said to no one in particular.

"That's what I thought when I observed it for the first time myself - the quantum bubble which this device generates can accelerate the speed of time. So the banana's rotten because only a few moments have passed outside the bubble, but a month has just passed inside of it." Explained Manya.

"Does it work in both directions?" Enquired Martin. "What I mean, is can somebody use it to go _backwards_ in time and prevent themselves from making an awful life decision in terms of what relationships they have?"

Jenna managed to notice that as he said this second sentence, he gave a very quick glance in her direction. "Do you have to? Right now, in public?"

"Hey, you shot off that same kind of comment outside a minute ago, so you shouldn't be surprised when you get some sass of your own in return." He replied quietly with a shrug.

"I'm afraid it can't reverse time, only speed it up." Manya answered his question.

"I've read papers about this kind of research before. This kind of temporal manipulation is theoretically possible." Said Connor.

"I think I heard of it once myself, too; obviously it's not so theoretical anymore." Eve smiled a little bit in her own awe at this new development.

"You do realise that this thing could be used as a weapon, though?" The Xelayan-Human spoke up. "Entire vast, mighty armies could be reduced to nothing more than frail elders in just seconds."

"Thats why you're here." Dr. Chaudri started to elaborate further on the reason for the false supplies request: "We couldn't risk sending word to the UIFA about this discovery, because if the Windermereans intercepted that message then they could have got here before you did. If this device fell into the wrong hands, then you're right: it could indeed be used for conquest and leave the Planetary Union vulnerable to attack."

"Well, we're only one ship and not that much of a big one either, so we'd better call for the help we need." Said Jenna, removing her communicator from her own jacket's side pocket and flipping it open. "Kaufmann to _Valkyrie_."

"Hey Jen." Hank, back on the ship's bridge and sitting in her chair as the acting Captain, answered.

"Get a coded message out to Bruce at Union Command Central that the scientific institute on Epsilon-Iota is in possession of a-"

"Put down the communicator!" She was interrupted by the sound of an aggressive American-accented voice from the other side of the room, to which she and the others, including the other researchers present, looked up to see a male facility staff member holding up what appeared to be a phaser pistol which wasn't UIFA-issue but still, nevertheless, managed to hold their attention. 

"Kyle, what the hell are you doing?" Manya asked with her own aggressive tone.

"Be quiet!" He snapped back. "All of you, put your communicators and your weapons down _now_. Or else one of you will fall dead at my feet."


	3. S1E1: Old Wounds [3/3]

"What is this? What's going on?" Asked Jenna, her and everyone else around him still having their eyes fixed on the facility staff member with a pistol in his hand.

"I said put your communicator and your gun _down_! _Do it_!" He yelled in response.

"Alright, alright, we'll do as you say." The Captain slowly knelt down to place both of these items of hers onto the floor and, following her lead, the others did the same while still not turning their heads away at all. Understandably, they felt a bit on-edge about their current situation.

"Who is this man?" Andrea enquired to Manya, keeping her voice down by a few notches.

"Kyle Ashton, one of our lab technicians; he's been working here for a little under six months now."

This man himself reached inside the pocket of his own institute uniform's jacket and emerged again a moment later, holding a communicator device of his own which he proceeded to flip open. "W.B.C _Terati_ , I have the device as ordered." 

"Stand by, Commander." There was the sound of someone replying, a fellow male, by the sound of it, from the other end of the line.

"W.B.C...?" Eve took a moment to realise what the initials of this ship he'd mentioned were, before her eyes went wide even though it was only slightly so. "...Windermerean Battlecruiser - you're working for them!"

"You catch on quick." Said Kyle with a smirk.

"Jen, we've got company up here." Hank's own voice spoke out from Jenna's communicator on the floor. It was mostly subliminal, but anyone could tell that as he spoke his tone contained a sense of growing worry. "A big-ass Windermerean ship's just entered orbit."

Markus and Arthur, still sitting in front of him on the bridge, looked out through the viewscreen. The battlecruiser which had just dropped out of warp was indeed, as the Second Officer had eloquently put it, "big-ass", as it was about three times the size of the _Valkyrie,_ and this size was one of the contributing factors to the aura of mighty superiority emanating from it along with the dark hull colours and the dark teal glow from its own warp nacelles. And from its presence in general. As per the designed appearance of their people's other ships, the _Terati_ was thin and pointed at the front end with three warp drive nacelles: one each in the wing-like structures sitting closely to the main body on either side and another in the one on the top, which stuck out similarly to the dorsal fin of a certain Earth sea creature known as the great white shark.  
"Raise shields, red alert."

"Aye sir. We're not going to have a simple job in terms of our reports later, are we?" Said Arthur to Markus, while their own ship's red alert sound began to come into play and the ambient lighting additionally changed to this same colour.

"Nope."

"Captain Kaufmann, I'm detecting a transporter energy surge from the enemy ship; I think some of them are beaming down to you." The Helmsman then warned his commanding officer via her communicator back on the surface down below, but, as you'd expect, he and the others on the bridge began to feel wary when it was met only with silence. "Captain?"

"Tell them the _Terati_ comes in peace and to power down their weapons." Ordered Kyle.

"There's no way they'll believe us." Andrea replied.

"Just _do it_! I don't care which one of you it is as long as you do what I say!"

"Kaufmann to _Valkyrie_." Jenna responded to the call, after kneeling back down again to pick up the previously-mentioned handheld device in order to do so. "It's alright Mr. Doyle, the Windermerean ship is here in peace. They just... um... they came down... for..." She was struggling to work out what kind of explanation to provide him and the bridge crew with, because she knew full well right now that if she said the wrong thing then the people around her were going to start getting killed.

"The lab's having a video gaming party and their crew have been invited." Martin quickly gave this reason of his own, saving her from this predicament.

"Damn, you guys down there are so lucky!" Responded a Kzarmiloid Ensign from the Security division who was manning Andrea's station in her current absence.

"You sure?" Hank asked, his eyebrows furrowing. "Did you just say a _gaming party_?"

"Yeah, it's for staff birthdays." Said the Commander, getting into the swing of the lie he'd invented a moment ago on the spot.

"They've got a lot of September birthdays here." Added the one in the glasses.

Andrea, who'd spent the last few seconds covertly eyeing up a large, non-vital component of a generator behind her - which she guessed to be the supplier of the energy for the other pieces of lab machinery around the room - finally seized the moment to go ahead with what she'd been planning in these seconds: she effortlessly ripped this large component away from the rest and, just as quickly, hurled it at Kyle's head. As soon as it made its impact, he went down to the floor, unconscious, as if someone had flicked a light switch off.

"Good work, Lieutenant." Complimented Jenna to the Security Chief, who had now ran over to Kyle's body and was in the process of binding his wrists together with a pair of handcuffs. Eve approached him, too, so that she could use her medical scanner to check whether the theory she'd just had was true.

"Keates to _Valkyrie_ , the battlecruiser is here to attack and there's no gaming party. Repeat: there is _no gaming party_."

"Oh man!" The Kzarmiloid Ensign sighed at what could have been.

"Keep the weapons charged and the shields up until we can get back to you." Said Jenna.

"Okay." Hank, in return, acknowledged while nodding his head, before the female who'd just spoken flipped her communicator shut again. "We have to get the time accelerator back to the ship, away from the Windermereans."

"Dr. Chaudri, what do we need to do to safely transport the device?" Connor asked.

"Just detach its main generator and keep the controller device safe." Answered Manya, ushering the other technicians and researchers in the room out of the door as they ran to find safety from the incoming enemy troops. 

"I knew it..." Eve, meanwhile, muttered to herself a few feet away while she was still kneeling above Kyle and looking down at the screen of her scanner. "I thought this man was just a collaborator but apparently what I'd also been thinking is true: he's not a Human at all." She put this device of her own away into one of her pockets and turned around to face the rest of the away team. "His DNA is Windermerean."

"He obviously must've been surgically altered to not look like one, then." Reasoned the Indian scientist who'd spoken previously as she and the five from the _Valkyrie_ also made their own swift exit. "He was well and truly one of them..."

Members of this race who took up some of the crew complement of the W.B.C _Terati_ were now entering into the institute from all sides, firmly clutching their own make of energy rifles in their arms and moving in lockstep at a pace which was somewhere between marching and running. The Windermereans were almost completely humanlike in terms of outward appearance, like Xelayans, Zolans or androids, except for two differences: compared to Humans and the first of these three, they were that little bit more prone to having naturally bright hair colours, and in this hair was a small, differently-coloured part of it dubbed a "rune", an external part of their brain of sorts due to the fact that it glowed brightly when a strong emotion was felt. For a male, there could be either one or two runes and they dangled prominently from the front of his hair, whereas a female could only have one and it was embedded in more deeply near to her forehead area. What both genders had in common, though, was that they had equal rights in their society and they shared the same xenophobia for outsiders.  
The Windermereans seemed to hold a key cultural belief that billions of years prior, they were specially created by a hyper-advanced species known as the Architectors, who were thought to currently be extinct. As a result, they viewed themselves as superior to other intelligent races due to being the Architectors' "heirs" and, to put it simply, saw it as their duty to be a bunch of pompous and reclusive gits. This solitary nature of theirs didn't stop them from attacking Planetary Union ships whenever they saw fit, though, which was the reason behind why the latter and the Windermere Kingdom had a mutual dislike towards each other.

"Hold on." Andrea held up her hand to motion for the other five with her to stay behind the wall they were running past right now - in the atrium which it led out to, some the _Terati_ 's officers who had beamed down and gotten in were holding the researchers who hadn't fled up against the walls at gunpoint while the rest continued on their way through. They were still mortal, flesh and blood beings like everyone else there, but these Windermerean troops still gave off the impression of being mighty and intimidating combatants just by glances at them; their crisp, tight uniforms were black with dull gold highlights on the sleeves and trousers, their collars were turned up and there was metallic armour, also dull gold to match the highlights, across the tops of their shoulders. Their tall brown boots which went up to just above the knee were just as tight but simultaneously form-fitting as the rest of the uniform.

"Is there another way out of here?" Jenna asked Manya quietly.

"There's a supplies and cargo warehouse attached to the facility which we can get out through, but it's all the way across the atrium." The latter answered at the same volume, pointing to a door on the other side of the room before them.

"Looks like we're gonna have to sprint for it." Said Martin, him and the other four UIFA officers raising the pistols which they'd each been grasping. "Try to stay behind Andrea, Doc."

"Which one of you is Andrea again?" Said Manya.

"That's me." The Xelayan-Human raised her hand.

"Sorry, I'm awful with names."

" _Go!_ " The Captain then yelled out, to which she, Martin, Eve, Connor, Andrea and Manya broke into a run across the atrium. The Windermereans obviously spotted them straight away and a firefight was initiated, the _Valkyrie_ five's gleaming white pistols - which didn't look dissimilar to that of the film _Ghost in the Shell_ \- against the dark grey assault rifles of the _Terati_ crewmembers. The former group managed to lay down enough cover fire for Manya to successfully make her way to the door at the other end, although at this same time Connor, who was the one carrying the time accelerator invention, was caught in the left shoulder by one particular enemy shot, making him gasp slightly. It gave him a small window of opportunity, however, to get this enemy squarely in the torso, which he seized. His and his own crewmates' weapons for designed for stunning, which meant their discharges could render the target unconscious, while the Windermereans also didn't favour killing but preferred to use energy discharges which could inflict actual wounds. One opposing officer rushed Eve, who was at the back of the pack, which she responded to by engaging in a hand-to-hand fight with him. He swung the butt of his gun at her head, which she narrowly ducked out the way of before throwing a punch to the side of his face and quickly stunning him with a shot from her own pistol.

The _Valkyrie_ itself, while this was going on, had spent the last couple of minutes engaged in its own battle against the _Terati_. They were locked in an exchange of several shots from their respective phaser cannons whilst maneuvering around each other like cats hissing at one another. There was simultaneously another exchange, being respectively of missiles and torpedoes.

"Shields at 70%." Reported Markus.

"I've got an idea; I think I can buy us some time until we can beam the away team back up!" Arthur suddenly announced as he turned around to face Hank. "Permission to wing it and use a different combat maneuver, sir?"

This Lieutenant-Commander thought for a moment, worrying about what he might be about to get himself and the whole ship into before deciding that if it meant getting out of their current situation, then it was worth it. "Granted." He nodded.

"This is a nifty little trick me and the others at the Academy liked to call Hugging the Donkey..." The male Briton turned back around and set to work with pressing some desk buttons beneath him.

"Have you done it before?" Asked the android with the two different eye colours.

"Once."

"Oh well that's comforting." Hank remarked derisively.

Arthur swung their own ship around the _Terati_ , made even easier by the fact that the latter was a lot bigger and therefore less agile, with expert piloting, seeming to put the Second Officer's concerns and sarcastic comment to rest. To the surprise of everyone there on the bridge, Arthur's aim and expertise at continuing to swing it in a clockwise motion and making use of this dangerous combat maneuver were impressive as his personnel file had said earlier in terms of his piloting in general, and it appeared to be providing a significant amount of help for them to dodge the fire from the battlecruiser.

"Round and round she goes!" Arthur cheered to himself as he and the others held on tightly to the seats they were perched in.

The away team and Manya had made it through the corridors on the other side of the door they'd reached and into the warehouse she'd mentioned a minute ago, now finally arriving at the outer exit door on one side of its interior. As this latter woman immediately set to work on typing in the passcode to open the outer door, the others could have sworn that they were beginning to hear the faint, growing sound of brisk footsteps off in the corridor several meters behind them, pounding against the solid and well-polished floors with the kind of ominosity which matched how fearsome the sound's owners appeared visually.

"Come on..." Manya muttered to herself through clenched teeth, trying to pick up the pace. The five behind her raised up their pistols again defensively in the event of their Windermerean pursuers reaching them.This wareouse had a lot of wide, open space with a few boxes here and there off at the sides in various positions, some empty and some still containing pieces or whole parts of new supplies, so it wasn't really the best environment for dodging behind objects in combat.

After a few painful seconds of these officers preparing themselves for an incoming fight, the door came undone.

"Okay, go!" Jenna yelled out again as Manya pulled it open and they all went out as quickly as they could. However, they were now faced with another problem dead ahead, because another dozen enemy troops were securing that outer area of the building, and had their guns aimed squarely at this door they'd just used.

"Oh damn - we're gonna need another sprint for it." Said Martin quickly before pulling his gun and shooting towards this new group, his quartet of crewmates then doing the same. From there, it was a mad scramble of ducking, shooting from afar and running as fast as they could across that area of the grounds and away from the main building, some Windermereans getting caught by their pistol discharges as they'd hoped and going down, stunned, and then came the moment where they reached the place in front of the facility where the away team had beamed down to in the first place. Jenna and Marrtin were at the front, Manya and Connor were in the middle with the latter still carrying the device and with his left shoulder bleeding blue, the uniform fabric around that area being torn, and Andrea and Eve were on the rear guard. The former hurriedly flipped open her communicator.

"Kaufmann to _Valkyrie_ , six to beam up!" They needed this spot again so that they'd have the best chance of being away from where the invasion and all the action was happening, in order to ensure they could be safely beamed up with a minimum risk of getting attacked.

"This is North in transporter room one, I'm bringing you back up now ma'am."

While Arthur was still using the maneuver dubbed Hugging the Donkey, one particular torpedo fired by the _Terati_ managed to catch a part of one of the _Valkyrie_ 's warp nacelles, shaking the ship and making this maneuver cease due to it doing a bit of a number on the general engines in the process. Some sparks flew from one of the desks at the side on the bridge.  
"Planetary Union vessel, surrender and prepare to be boarded." The same voice who'd responded to "Kyle Ashton"'s communicator addressed the currently-assembled bridge crew through their communication systems.

"If it's all the same to that bloke I don't think we should, do you?" Everyone turned around as they heard the sound of their own Captain, who, like the other four who'd gone down with her, was glad to be back onboard again. Jenna, Martin, Andrea and Connor were seen entering the bridge, accompanied by Manya, who was now the one in charge of holding the time accelerator, and Eve.

"Good to have you guys back up here." Said Hank, standing up from the commanding officer chair and returning to his own station. 

"Agreed." She and her second-in-command also sat back down along with the android and the hybrid, and Manya remained stood up at the back. "Mr. Doyle, if I can buy us some time, do you think you can restore enough engine power to warp us out of here?"

"Yes ma’am, I’ll try." 

"Open a channel, Lieutenant Kitan."

"Channel open." Informed Andrea.

"W.B.C _Terati_ commanding officer, this is Captain Jenna Kaufmann. Call off your attack on the Epsilon-Iota surface and we can talk about this; no one needs to get hurt."

The visual image of the battlecruiser's own leader appeared on the viewscreen, sitting in his chair which was alone in the centre of his own bridge. He had short, combed silver hair with green eyes and two lighter green runes dangling from the front on either side of his head and, like all other Windermerean ship Captains, wore a white uniform variant to set them apart from all the other officers with lower ranks, and his face was twisted somewhat to form a threatening glare. "I am Captain Etrem Obrexim. Hand over the device to us, or I will be left with no choice but to destroy your ship, Kaufmann."

"What device?"

"You _know_ what I'm referring to, earthling." Etrem snarled back, making use of his people's derogatory term for Humans.

"Oh! Oh yes, that invention they've recently made!" She was still going ahead with her plan to stall him for long enough to allow them to eventually flee, so a second ago she'd simply been playing dumb in order to achieve this end. "Sorry, it's been a bit of a slow day until now. I'm just a bit distracted - I've been dealing with a break up and it's been a difficult time for me."

"Seriously? You're bringing this up in public _again_?" Martin leaned across and hissed this to her irritatedly.

"I'm trying to keep him talking to buy us some time." Replied Jenna.

"Oh, you're doing it to buy us time? Okay, in that case..." He turned back to face the front and addressed the _Terati_ leader. "Captain Obrexim, you're a third party who doesn't know either of us at all, so lemme ask you something: would you say you normally try to balance your work life with your domestic life?"

"You're bringing _him_ into this?" The woman in the glasses sighed.

"I think I would say that, yes." Etrem, although slightly confused, responded to the question regardless, and Martin ignored her, too, as he continued,

"And would you say a good, healthy relationship needs compromise?"

"Yes, on both sides." Said the other Captain, whilst the _Valkyrie_ 's own was rolling her eyes and becoming more and more annoyed.

"And if you didn't make that effort to compromise and to keep your home life and career balanced, would you be surprised if your partner went off to find comfort with somebody else instead?"

"No, that would be selfish."

"Oh like you're both bleeding saints!" Jenna snapped at the two of them, making everyone else on the _Valkyrie_ bridge who was beginning to experience worry about the recurrence of tension in the room feel even more so. "You know what? I don't have to sit here and listen to this. I don't have to listen a complete and total stranger taking my ex's side and encouraging him to-" She was suddenly cut off as the _Terati_ fired another phase cannon shot at the _Valkyrie_. The area that was hit was still shielded, but the force of it caused the ship to shake on impact. 

"Enough games! You have twenty seconds to comply, or else you will all be dead."

"How are we doing on the engines, Arthur?"

"They still haven’t got enough power restored, ma’am." This Lieutenant answered.

"Andrea, put the _Terati_ on hold just for a minute." Said the American Commander, to which this female officer nodded and did as she was told, making the viewscreen image of Captain Obrexim disappear.

"What are you doing...?" Asked Jenna, wondering what exactly it was that he most likely had up his sleeve.

"I think I have a plan. Doc, is it possible to set off the time device remotely, like say... from here while the device itself is onboard the _Terati_?"

"I believe so." Responded Manya from behind the pair. "I think that amount of distance is narrowly within the parameters that have been programmed into the controller pad so far. But what are you planning to do that for?"

"To accelerate the growth of this." His hand took a dive into one of his pockets and then resurfaced a moment later, holding up what appeared to be a little brown seed for everyone around him to see. "It's a tree seed - I swiped it from one of the botany labs while we were making a run for it when all those Windermerean troops beamed down. How far into the future can the acceleration go?"

"About a century."

"Long enough for a tree to grow to full size." One side of Martin's mouth curled upwards knowingly.

It took a second, but Jenna and the others then all showed looks of realisation at what he meant by all this. "You diamond..." She shook her head and chuckled. "Alright, let's do it: let's give them the device. Andrea, put Obrexim back on."This mentioned Security Chief was also smiling to herself at the plan as she obeyed the order, and the _Terati_ commanding officer soon reappeared on the viewscreen. "Okay then Captain, you win. We'll beam it over to you." She managed to quickly wipe away the facial proof of her chuckle from a second ago.

"A wise choice, earthling. Don't keep me waiting for long." He nodded to someone to his right side, out of the shot of the visual communication image, and the call was ended altogether. Martin got up and exited the bridge with Manya, heading on their way to get some glue first to stick the seed to the top of the device and, afterwards, to the nearest transporter room.

Another two or three minutes went by, after which these two who had left to set his idea into motion were now assembled back on the bridge and another visual call with the bridge of the battlecruiser was taking place. The time invention had just dematerialised from one of the _Valkyrie_ 's own transporter, its destination being the counterpart onboard the former.

"You should have the device now." Informed Jenna.

"Excellent."

Martin craned his head around and nodded towards Manya, who had the controller pad held behind her back in her right hand, and then turned back towards the viewscreen and smiled. "Happy Arbor Day."

"What?" Etrem's eyes went somewhat wide in perplexity and concern at what this Human was talking about. There wasn't much chance for the former to say or hear anything more, however, as Manya had just pressed the activation button, causing the device to set off its time acceleration field with the tree seed right on top of it.  
Within just two seconds, this tree - a redwood, to be specific - had burst up through the numerous decks of the _Terati_ and, another couple of seconds later, all the way through this ship as a whole, sticking out of the top like the universe's biggest splinter. The communication line was completely cut off due to the fact that now, the ship had been broken apart in half by this exponential growth of the redwood, leaving no doubt at all that it was now destroyed. These halves and some bits of debris in various sizes were all that remained.

"Wow!" Opined Manya in awe at what she'd just witnessed her institution's latest creation accomplish.

"You can say that again." Hank concurred, now making use of his own chuckle. "And 'Happy Arbor Day'... huh. Not bad as puns go."

"Don't encourage him. This might turn into a recurring thing sort of like James Bond, where he'll _always_ be doing pre-death puns." Eve made her own comment jokingly.

The next day, after Manya had been returned to Epsilon-Iota and the case had been declared closed, the _Valkyrie_ was once again drifting through space, this time without warp speed and more aimlessly due to it having no more specific missions at the moment: its only goal right now was exploration, the goal it had been built for in the first place. Repairs were underway on the damaged warp nacelle, courtesy of North and some members of her engineer team, which was why the ship was currently not making use of the warp drive and travelling only on impulse engines. Connor's shoulder which had been caught in the firefight at the scientific facility had additionally been healed back to normal by Eve and his android blood, known as Thirium, cleaned away.

Jenna was once more sitting in the office area of her quarters and busy at work on her computer when the door chime rang. "Come in."  
In stepped the very man who'd helped them all to evade being killed by Windermereans the previous day.

"Hey."

"Afternoon, Martin." She responded whilst the door slid shut again, mirroring the way they'd greeted each other yesterday when he first arrived onboard. But this time, fortunately, it was noticeably different and that was obvious to both of them - their body languages were more relaxed, and this time Jenna wasn't tightening her lips at the sight of him. The air was that little bit more clear between the pair, and it made them glad. "I was just in the middle of typing up my report on the whole Epsilon-Iota incident."

"Do you need any help?"

"No, oddly. I mean a device with the power to speed up and manipulate time was possibly somewhere around my two hundred and fiftieth guess on my list of what I thought I'd have to be writing about." The female one of the two laughed to herself fractionally, causing him to do the same. "Still, at least no one who'd want to use it against us can get their hands on it now."

"Yeah, I think it being destroyed with the _Terati_ meant it's all turned out okay in the end." As he continued to stand up in front of her in the middle of the room, he seemed to look like he wasn't entirely sure what to do with himself, as if he'd been called to a school headmaster's office and was waiting for this headmaster to arrive. He finally motioned towards one of the two seats in front of Jenna's desk. "Can I...?"

"Of course."

He walked forwards and sat down in it. "So... I didn't wanna come and bother you unless it was necessary, but I came to tell you that according to Bruce this morning, he said to me that some other Commanders have become available to be your First Officer, so it means I can leave and be stationed someplace else if you want."

"Really? That's... that's new." Jenna nodded in ever so slight surprise. "But there's one last thing I need to say to you: you went above and beyond during yesterday's ordeal. You came up with a plan that saved everyone's necks and I didn't properly thank you for it at the time, so this is me doing that now. It was brilliant, to be frank."

"Thanks." His own grateful expression was brief, afterwards transforming into a hesitant one of recalling memories and trying to think of how exactly to word what he was about to say. "And I... I'm sorry about the cheating a month ago, I really am. Like I said when I got here, it's the worst thing I've ever done by a long shot. I thought back then that spending those times with Tharela was a good substitute for missing time with you, like it'd give me some kind of comfort to fill the void, but I realised pretty soon after that day when you caught me in the act that it was basically just me being a coward." He then diverted the gaze of his eyes back upwards, directly at her again, and took a breath. "I should've told you how I was feeling and been brutally honest, but I retreated into some stupid fantasy world instead. I'm sorry, Jen."

She looked straight back with her own eyes. "I'm sorry as well. I was the one who triggered that event, so I was stupid too - you were right when you were talking with Captain Obrexim: relationships are supposed to be about compromise, and I didn't do that at all. I was a workaholic and it ultimately drove you away. I really _was_ just doing all that rank advancement for myself... Jesus, I was so bloody arrogant..."

"You don't have to take on all the weight by yourself." Said Martin. "Just rely a little more on others; you don't need to advance your career all on your own."

"You're right, again." Jenna replied in agreement. "That's something I know now, which is why I want you to stay."

His eyebrows raised themselves almost unnoticeably. "What?"

"I don't want you to leave the _Valkyrie_ , Martin. I know our relationship is over, but I don't think there's any reason why we can't just have a platonic friendship. I want you to stay onboard as my First Officer so that we can work together, because you're still one of my closest mates regardless of our romantic history. What do you think?" She held out her right hand and smiled after getting up out of her seat and walking around to the other side of the desk. "Friends?"

He looked at her outstretched hand for a moment, before he then stood up himself and, returning a smile of his own, reached out to put his right hand in hers and shook it. "Friends." He gave a nod of his head.

_Ending theme song for the Season 1 episodes:_

_https://youtu.be/lCWEEH6ZnG4_

_When you get to 1:08, go to 2:50 afterwards and then it finishes from there._


	4. S1E2: If the Stars Should Appear [1/3]

There was a light and relaxed mood aboard the U.S.S _Valkyrie_ as it was cruising at warp speed, past the barrier of the Planetary Union's so far known space and into the completely unknown; an empty page for the crew to write the stories of their escapades and discoveries upon. Or a canvas for painting these approaching madcap adventures on as opposed to the previously-mentioned proverbial written form. I can come up with quite a few metaphors for this but let's face it: I'll not only bore you with them - yes, you there, the one reading these words - but I'll most likely end up boring _myself_ stiff with them in addition. Where's the caffeine when you need it?  
Swerving along back onto the tracks of my main point, though, it had been a week since the Epsilon-Iota incident and the ship was in uncharted territory due to it not having any current errand-run missions from the UIFA, going ahead with the purpose of exploration which it had been constructed for in the first place a little bit over two decades ago. But with there being nothing that madcap going on and no discoveries being made right now which you might call thrilling, this relaxed mood onboard also ended up translating itself into one much simpler mindset: boredom.

"Star mapping is possibly one of the most dull things I can think of." Commented Arthur, sitting at his Helmsman station on the bridge as usual but with his head at a tilt in one hand, while his other hand was the only one using the buttons on his desk. After all, there was a grand total of nothing interesting going on, so the helm was hardly in need of focused piloting.

"Oh I know how you feel..." Markus added. So far the activity they were in the process of carrying out was jotting down the physical properties and positions of various stars around them, these characteristics appearing briefly as a chart of sorts on the bridge's front viewscreen before soon disappearing, now archived into the ship's computer banks.

Arthur looked at the Navigator next to him with mild surprise. "Really? I thought you would've enjoyed this."

The android nodded his head in reply. "People do think that a lot, and star mapping is... okay to me, I suppose, but I prefer to be finding something extraordinary, you know? Something different because of some kind of special physical property. When it's just charting ones without anything special or anything that notable about them, it gets boring for me quickly."

"We've gone beyond the Union's frontier, you two, as in past everything in space that the Union's already seen and into a whole new area. We're literally the first ones from the fleet to be here - doesn't that get you excited and make your forget about the star mapping at least a _little_ bit?" Andrea, overhearing their discussion, chuckled at the pair of them.

"I can't say it does."

"Me neither." Said Arthur in agreement. "Sometimes after you've spent a few minutes doing this it begins to feel sort of like you've been given the visual equivalent of rohypnol."

Martin was then noticed to have appeared and to be walking onto the bridge, taking his seat in the First Officer chair next to Jenna, who had already been present in her own chair during this conversation. He appeared to be gripping a white mug of what smelt like coffee in his left hand and a data pad in the other. "Morning everyone." He was replied to at the same time by Hank, Jenna and Andrea with, respectively, "Hey Martin", "Hi" and "Morning, sir".

"Is that the diagnostics data?" Jenna used her own left hand, her right clutching tea in a matching mug, to point at this pad he was holding.

"Yeah, North sent it last night." He handed it over to her so that she herself could have a look at the readings displayed on its screen, saying that the routine maintenance check recently carried out by this Chief Engineer didn't show any errors or abnormalities with the ship's systems. "She says the repairs on the nacelle that got hit by the W.B.C _Terati_ last week are all done now and fully finished, so we can go to higher warp speeds now."

"Good, I'll be sure to thank her the next time I see her."

Connor, at his own station at the side, noticed the carefree way that his commanding officer and her executive were interacting with each other and how they both exchanged smiles, to which he and the other four around him exchanged relieved looks, but they were interrupted as a proximity alert came up at Andrea's desk.   
"Captain, I'm picking up some kind of large artificial mass." She reported, reading this alert. "It's a few hundred thousand kilometres away on the starboard side."

"I'm getting a reading of this artificial structure as well." Added Connor. His eyes widened themselves slightly at the specific size he was looking at in blend of shock and scientific curiosity.

"Is it some kind of ship?" Hank asked.

"I'm doubting it, sir. It's unlikely that an object of this scale could be so."

"It can't be a space station - there are none this far out." Said Markus.

Martin turned his head towards the blue eyed woman next to him. "Do you think we should take a look?"

"We might as well. Mr. Doyle, adjust our heading to intercept." Said Jenna.

"Aye ma'am."  
Since it was only what was classed as a relatively short distance out of their way, the starship approached the subject of the strange screen readings within nothing more than about thirty seconds and, at this time, dropped out of warp speed accordingly. It was straight after this drop when, now faced with the sight of the mass right in front of them, the seven officers there on the bridge were all stuck with what else to do except from gazing out in pure, unadultered awe. What they were seeing was utterly unlike anything they'd ever witnessed before, and they couldn't remember ever conjuring up the mental image of it even in their imaginations' wildest, most out of control moments.

"Holy Christ on a bike..." The words simply slid out of Martin's mouth before he could fully register it.

"I don't think anyone will be be arguing with _that._ " Jenna, in the same manner, nodded her head and stood up from her chair.

What they were seeing was indeed a ship, as Hank had suspected, but what had prompted these reactions was the fact that it wasn't just large but was actually massive. In fact, no, scratch that, it was absolutely **colossal**. The closest comparison in terms of its shape would have been a compass, and as the _Valkyrie_ drifted towards it, the truth was that from a distance it would have been a minuscule speck, almost impossible to see without putting in effort, compared to this bigger ship. You would have been able to fit at least six thousand _Valkyrie_ s inside of it and even that was only a rough estimate.

_The opening theme for Season 1, which finishes at 1:34_

https://youtu.be/9XrfmiYmLGk

"What are we looking at?" Asked the Captain.

"Scans have confirmed that it is a ship as Lieutenant-Commander Anderson first thought. And its engines are also apparently offline - it seems to be drifting only by inertia." Said Connor.

"Are there any readings of lifeforms inside?"

"I don't know. I can't penetrate the outer hull, ma'am." He gave another answer, looking back down at his desk and making use of a few of the buttons there. "It's composed of an unfamiliar alloy."

"Who do you think would need a ship that big...?" Said Andrea as she spoke the question in her mind out loud.

"Maybe some rich guy who wants to show off at the club?" Hank suggested.

"I have just managed to find out via an analysis that it's approximately two thousand years old." The Science Officer added another scan discovery.

"And I've mapped its trajectory: if it keeps on drifting in this direction, it'll collide with a nearby star four months from now." Markus reported.

"It seems like we're going to have to get in, do some investigating and tell whoever's inside, if there is anyone." Jenna verbally laid out her plan of action.

"Only we apparently can't beam in, so we're gonna have to do it the old fashioned way." Responded Martin. "Connor, is there any kind of docking port for a shuttle?"

The Lieutenant-Commander with the green uniform took a moment to run some more scans and calculations on his desk. "There's a small port on the lower half of the hull which one of our shuttles should be able to dock with, sir."

"Alright then - Lieutenant Kitan, Connor, you two come with us. Hank, I'm leaving you in charge." The woman with the glasses motioned for these first two and her executive to follow her out of the bridge. "Tell Eve to meet us in the shuttle bay."

"You're the boss." He acknowledged as he moved to sit in the Captain chair. 

With the same five away team members as the ones that also left the ship during the Epsilon-Iota incident now onboard, one of the two shuttlecraft kept in the _Valkyrie_ 's bay drove through the empty space between the two ships, being piloted by Connor. This group of inhabitants were, indeed, still the same physical size as always, but having stepped out of their starship and onto a significantly smaller craft made them psychologically feel even more puny and microscopic compared to what they'd encountered without them meaning for this to be so - even this particular one currently piloting the shuttle, despite his mind being fully artificial and therefore not quite having the same intricate workings as those of the other four, also experienced this same, deeply embedded subconscious feeling to a smaller (no pun intended) degree.

"How big would you say this thing is?" Eve asked him.

"I'd estimate its interior area to be one thousand two hundred and ninety-three square kilometres, Doctor." The LED on his temple briefly changed from a solid blue, which was used to indicate that everything was fine both physically and emotionally, to a flickering yellow, which happened when the android it was attached to was carrying out an analysis, download or upload with their own software. Before they'd left the _Valkyrie_ a few minutes ago, he had downloaded the already conducted scans he'd carried out via his desk screen on the bridge in a matter of seconds.

"That's only a little bit less than the size of Los Angeles on Earth..." Andrea remarked in wonder.

"Whoever made it has to be from a race at the AA level." Commented Jenna, in this very same manner. She was referring to an elegant classification system used within the Union to identify which level of technological and cultural development a species belongs to, where DDD - nonexistence altogether - was the lowest and X - omnipotence and omniscience similar to that of God - was the highest, although the latter was the only level which, from the Union's findings, seemed to be inaccessible to every being except for the big man himself and other deities. Humankind and a large majority of the other species within this power, including the other three founders, belonged to level A, which was the invention of warp technology and, as a result, the ability to easily travel from star system to star system. Level AA was where the species in question could create ships which were a similar size to this one the away team were travelling over to or have some form of advanced planet-wide energy shield, or similar large-scale developments.

Another few seconds on, Connor had now safely docked the back of the shuttle to a hatch built into the port that had been found via the _Valkyrie_ 's computers earlier, all motion now having ceased.  
"Scans are indicating that there's a breathable atmosphere inside."

"Let's go and take a look." Declared Martin after the shuttle's own hatch at this back end opened out, with which he, Jenna, Eve, Connor and Andrea all turned around and exited it, walking towards a metallic door through a short tunnel made of this same material.

"It looks like this door hasn't been used in centuries." Said Andrea, and it was rather fair to say that she wasn't wrong - it was rusting in different places, all to varying degrees, and even on the parts where there was none of this rust, the surface still had some portions where it was visibly worn and chipped from a lack of maintenance. There was a large, equally worn and chipped lever in the middle of the door as a whole, on the lower half, that Jenna put her hands on and attempted to pull downwards, but it didn't budge a single millimeter. She spent another moment or two yanking down on it as hard as her arm muscles would allow, with the same result.

"Andrea, do you think you could work your magic on this?" She turned around to ask this question to the Security Chief, who nodded her head in response. The half Xelayan brunette stepped forwards to place her own hands onto the lever, managing to then successfully pull it down with only a little bit of physical effort due to the strength of this race which her father belonged to; the door opened up, allowing the five to step through and onto a metal catwalk lit by dim orange LED light strips underneath, at the sides. It lead to another, identical door about fifteen feet ahead, and surrounding this catwalk was a vast cavern of metal conduits and seemingly closed off corridors off in the distance on either side, going around the next door in a very wide circular shape and having the same kind of lighting here and there as the catwalk. Just for a moment, Eve looked down over one of the latter's sides, her eyes widening in a fresh sense of amazement as what she saw was that there seemed to be no ground in sight down there.

As soon as the next door opened up after Andrea repeated the same process, the five were abruptly hit by a burst of sunlight in their eyes, causing them to squint as they walked through it. After a moment, the intensity of it seemed to clear, allowing them to see the environment laid out before them. Right in the middle of the heavily, incredibly expansive ceiling meant to imitate a baby blue sky, which was devoid of any "clouds", was the source of the apparent sunlight, presumed by the away team to possibly be a large bulb of some kind, and by looking closely up at the "sky", there were ever so thin lines as if to separate parts of an internal metal hull. Around them, miles away, there were grassy hills, lush woodland areas and even a few snow-capped mountains. It were almost as if the five were back on their homeworlds again.

"This is a bioship." Eve finally spoke out, ending the stunned silence that had settled in amongst them while they took in all this scenery, including the soft, gleaming green grass blades beneath their feet. "And I think it's the biggest bioship the Union's ever even heard of..."

"The grass is real grass." Connor added as he knelt down and pulled some strands of it from the ground underneath him and held it in his hands, carrying out another scan courtesy of his own software. "Although I can't tell whether it was present two thousand years ago or whether it instead grew over time." He stood back up again to hand these strands to the Chief Medical Officer so that she could have a look and a feel of them for herself. Around her, Andrea, Jenna and Martin leaned towards her slightly so that they, too, could look closely in fascination.

"Are there any lifeform readings nearby?" Queried the commanding officer.

Connor pulled out his handheld scanner device from his pocket, using it to conduct this requested wide-scale analysis. "Yes ma'am - several million humanoids."

"If their engines have died and they're drifting towards a star, why aren't they sending out any distress signals?" Said Martin.

"Maybe their communcations systems aren't functioning either...?" Andrea suggested. "I mean this ship's about two millenia old, so that might've gone dead as well since then."

"Well, regardless, they're in trouble. We're going to have to make contact, so that we can warn them." Jenna was still looking out at the ever awe-inspiring scenery.

"What are we going to say? 'Hello there, we live across the road. We were wondering if we could borrow a cup of sugar'?" Said Eve, in a joking manner.

"I don't know, we'll basically just try to tell them the truth as we go along." The other woman who'd previously spoken removed from her own pocket her communicator and flipped it open. "Kaufmann to _Valkyrie_." Her eyebrows furrowed somewhat, though, when all she got was a chirp from this device in indication of her not getting through, to which she tried again. " _Valkyrie_ , this is Kaufmann. Do you read?" The same chirp was received on her end afterwards.

"It seems that our own electronic communcations can't get through the outer hull, either." Connor looked back down at his scanner once more.

"Lieutenant Kitan, head back to the shuttle and contact the _Valkyrie_ from there; tell them we're going to have a look around. We'll split up: you and Martin go starboard, me, Connor and Eve will take the port side, and we'll all meet up again back here three hours from now, at thirteen hundred hours."

"Aye ma'am." Andrea acknowledged, beginning to walk back towards the door to carry out this first order with the latter-mentioned three starting to walk off to the left down the hill they were all standing on, although it was roughly a second and a half later when she turned back around again, stopping in her tracks and the three stopped walking in addition as she asked a question. "Wait, is thirteen hundred hours..?"

"Yeah, it is 1 PM." Martin answered her question before she could fully form the rest of her sentence.

"1 PM. Right. Sorry, that system just sometimes messes around with me." With that, she turned back around again and continued on her way back to the shuttle to send the message, while Martin remained where he was so as to wait for her to return and Jenna, Eve and Connor set off.


	5. S1E2: If the Stars Should Appear [2/3]

The detail woven deep into their surroundings continued to amaze Jenna, Eve and Connor. They had now walked across some distance on the left half of the scenery which they'd seen in front of them a few minutes ago, during which they couldn't fail to notice how the "sunlight" shone through the leaves of the trees they were surrounded by, these leaves being a shade of green not too dissimilar to those of trees found on Earth, Xelaya and quite a few other Union member worlds. The light cast a colourful gleam through the leaves, highlighting their midribs and veins on their surfaces in the process due to these parts being rendered slightly darker. Some areas of the woodland terrain around the three were additionally lit up in curtains of this light while the rest wasn't, being sheltered by bushes and grassy slopes and the aforementioned trees - it was as if it were a recreation of the rural parts of Earth itself but located far, _far_ away from this planet.

"Hold on." Eve suddenly stopped in her tracks upon seeing something entirely different, several meters in front of where they were currently walking. "Jen, look."

What she'd just spotted was a smallish wooden cabin, surrounded by a particularly dense area of trees and sitting subtly in its surroundings, neither standing out nor blending in either.

"Seems like it's time to meet the locals." Jenna said, her and Connor also still looking at it themselves along with the blonde, before, with this Captain leading the way, they approached the cabin, preparing themselves for the conversations that were soon to follow. With Eve and the only male one of three still both standing behind her, she gently knocked the knuckles of one of her hands against the door, a dark green colour and consequently easily distinguished from the brown planks and slates that made up the structure itself, once they were close enough. It didn't take long for the door to open up from the inside, revealing to be stood there a woman in a thin, braided brown necklace and a modest tunic, whose own colour was a dull grey-green. She had shoulder-length middle brown hair and what appeared to be several dark brown spots stretching down from the top of the middle of her forehead to halfway down the bridge of her nose in a triangular shape. "Hi, I'm Captain Jenna Kaufmann of the-" The newcomer attempted to introduce herself, but it was very soon after the door was opened when this woman she was face to face with quickly threw it shut again, her eyes widening in surprise as soon as she saw the trio. "Of the Jehovah's Witnesses." Jenna finished her sentence with this false ending as a remark about this.

"Bit rude." Commented Eve in addition.

"Should we try again, ma'am?" Asked Connor.

"We might as well, while we're still here." The one in the glasses took a breath and knocked on the door for a second time a moment afterwards. This time, a man who the three guessed was probably the woman's husband or other definition of romantic partner was the one who answered it. His hair was short, dark and curly, and he had a matching full beard similar to Hank's, along with the same cluster of triangular-shaped forehead spots, a characteristic which they presumed to be of the species that he and the woman belonged to.  
Jenna tried again, "Hi there, I'm Captain Jenna Kaufmann of the- _oh god!_ " It took no time for them to see that this man was holding a shotgun in his hands, which they hurriedly ducked out the way of as he attempted to fire it at the one who'd just spoken. She did a combat roll to her left, towards one of the dozens of nearby trees, while the Science Officer managed to, just as quickly, pull out his phaser pistol from the holster strapped to his right thigh and shoot him with it. The projectile successfully hit its target and the man with the shotgun went out like a light instantly, falling to the ground.

The younger one of the two women stood up from her kneeling position. "Thanks, Connor." He gave a nod of his head and a small smile in acknowledgement, slipping his weapon back into the thigh holster.

The trio proceeded to enter into the cabin through the now open door. The inside that their eyes were greeted by was a room, smallish like the cabin itself as a whole, which was to their right and was dimly-lit by an orange lantern hanging up on one side next to the door, and what was in the room was what you'd typically associate with a rural house in the Victorian or even medieval era: modest wooden cabinets and a table and chairs in the centre made of this same material. The woman they'd seen a few seconds ago, the first one to answer the door, was standing in one corner all the way on the other side of the room, shifting her weight around on her feet and visibly nervous at the sight of the three.

"It's okay; you're husband's going to be alright, he's only stunned." Eve tried to reassure her, before suddenly looking to her left at Connor. "You didn't kill him, did you?"

"Of course not." He responded.

"He's only stunned." The doctor repeated her point.

"We'd like to talk to you for a minute, if we can." Said Jenna.

"Who are you?" Asked the woman, her eyes very wide. "What do you want from us?"

"My name's Jenna, and this is Eve and Connor." The leader of the trio motioned to the respective owners of these names. "Our own ship encountered yours adrift in space a few minutes ago, and we also found out that your engines have gone offline and you're drifting into the path of a star. We'd like to help you with trying to make repairs, or, if that doesn't work, offer evacuation ships."

"I don't understand." The woman shook her head slightly in confusion.

"There's some things that we don't understand ourselves, either. Where did this ship come from? How did it end up this far out here in empty space?"

"I don't understand what you're asking."

"Captain, I don't think these people know that they're onboard a spacecraft." Connor deduced.

"Are you from the Underland?" Said the woman, to which Jenna and Eve exchanged looks of their own confusion with each other. "Please don't hurt us! We're decent, faithful people - we embrace the word of Naaru!"

"Who's Naaru?" Enquired Eve, but before this question could be answered, she and her two fellow officers heard the sound of a door opening from off to their left.

"Mum?" The voice of a boy spoke out, this boy himself standing in the doorway. He looked to be around eighteen or nineteen years old, and had very light blue-grey eyes and short black hair like his father, but this boy's own was neat as opposed to curly.

"Get back in your room, now." The woman said.

"We don't mean your family any harm." Jenna also spoke to him.

"Well, we did technically just shoot his dad, Jen..." Eve said to her at a slightly more quiet volume.

"I thought you were the one talking just now about how he's only stunned." She replied back before addressing the boy again, "Aside from shooting your dad we don't mean your family any harm. He's going to be okay, he's only unconscious."

"Are you real?" He looked at them with a different expression being channelled through his eyes. While his mother's was of fear, his own was of wonder and curiosity.

"Yeah, we were the last time we checked." The brown-haired Human chuckled slightly as she gave this reply.

An excited smile suddenly surfaced on his face. "Are you from the Beyond?"

"That's enough! You shut your mouth Tomilin, you know blasphemy like that is forbidden in this house!" His mother snapped at him, to which Eve held up her hand on the side nearest to her in indication of wanting silence.

"Tomilin, is it? What's the Beyond?" This blonde enquired, to which he nodded in confirmation of his name.

"It's what lies beyond these entire lands - beyond the hills, the trees, everything. It's the place that's outside of this one. The place outside of just this one realm."

"I said that's _enough!_ " His mother shouted again, but it fell on deaf ears. The away team trio's attention was now grabbed.

"I think we might be, yes." Jenna nodded her head.

At this response, Tomilin's awestruck smile increased in size, and he then started walking at a brisk pace towards the door. "Come with me, there's someone I want you to meet." After these words were spoken, the three decided that they might as well follow him, as he seemed, after all, to be the only one who might even have the slightest idea of how to answer their burning questions regarding the origins of this bioship they were in, while his mother yelled out in vain for him to come back.

"Where are you taking us? And who's this person you want us to see?" Connor enquired, once what was now the group of four were about minute's walk away from the cabin, in the depths of the woods around it.

"His name's Jahavus. There are some of us who believe in the existence of the Beyond, and he's our leader; he's the one who started the movement in the first place. Some people refer to us the Reformers." Tomilin explained. "We believe that there's more to the universe than just what we can see, so for you three to turn up is exactly the kind of proof we were looking for."

"And we heard your mum mention someone called Naaru - who is that?" Said Eve.

"He's the creator of all things." Replied the teenager. "He made this world and everyone in it, but the belief that me and the other Reformers have is that he didn't just create this one world alone."

"So, essentially, he's God? As in the Big Man with a capital B and M?" Jenna asked to clarify.

"That's what we're taught, yes." He nodded his head. "Sorry about my mother, by the way. She was just scared, and she and my dad can be a little set in their ways."

"It's alright, I'm just glad we got out of there before your dad wakes up."

All of a sudden, Tomilin, the one leading the way, stopped walking. "Here it is." He pointed out in front of him, to another, larger clearing in this deep area of the woodland where a barn about three times the size of his family's cabin was perched. Despite this bigger size in terms of its structure, it nonetheless gave off the impression of not standing out that much at all, as if it were a prey animal hiding from some kind of nearby predator. Once they'd approached the barn another few seconds later, Tomilin pulled open one of the large doors at the side, allowing the occupants to get a look at them and the _Valkyrie_ trio to look at them in return: there were roughly around two dozen other people inside, the presence of the same forehead spots confirming their theory of it being a species-specific characteristic, who were dressed in varying shabby clothing such as torn scarves, tunics and bandanas of dull colours. Eve was about to leap into action and check them for injuries until, only a quarter of a second later, she and her pair of coworkers realised that none of them appeared to be hurt even slightly - they carried themselves confidently and without any trouble walking. They were sitting in various places around the barn, some talking amongst themselves while standing at the side and others sitting at the long wooden table in the middle, whilst a few sat in chairs away from this table. Some of them were middle-aged, some were relatively young adults and a handful of others were teenagers around Tomilin's age, and a two or three appeared to be younger teenagers. They didn't look that dissimilar to a gang of survivors from a zombie apocalypse film.  
"My friends, our world is about to change!" Tomilin announced to his fellow Reformers, who had begun to instantaneously stop everything they were doing and stare in their own awe at the three newcomers behind him.

A man who had been sitting at the long table got up from his seat and made his way over to the now wide open doorway. He was only a tiny, almost unnoticeable fraction shorter than Connor and had tan skin and a lanky body build, and the trio guessed that he was in his early fifties. What he also had was full grey stubble with short and tidy dark brown hair, which was greying in places and somewhat wavy at the tips, and light brown eyes. He was wearing a long, hooded dark grey cloak which was pinned around his right shoulder.

"My name's Jenna Kaufmann, this is Eve Ferencz and Connor."

"I'm Jahavus Vharan." He introduced his own first name amicably once he was in front of them and reached out his hand with a smile, to which the trio took turns shaking it. "And it looks like our prayers have been answered."

Back onboard the bridge of the _Valkyrie_ , meanwhile, Hank was still sitting in Jenna's Captain chair, now gripping a mug of coffee in one of his hands. He absentmindedly drummed his index and middle finger from his right hand on the arm of that side of this chair, wondering where the five who had gone into the much bigger ship had gone due to them not being able to get in touch. To put it simply, he was bored again.

"Where the hell've those guys got to...?" He said to himself.

"I don't know either, sir. I've been trying over and over again for the last few minutes but there's still no signal getting through from them." Markus responded to him.

"Lieutenant-Commander Connor was right: the outer hull of that thing outside must be rather thick." Opined Arthur, before his eyes widened at the prospects and possibilities he was coming up with at that moment. "You don't think they've found some kind of time travel technology in there do you? Maybe that's why the hull's got that thickness and why that ship in its entirety is so big - because of having to hide forbidden advancements like that inside of it!"

Hank quirked his eyebrows and looked at the Helmsman in front of him. "What would they wanna use time travel technology for, if the thing _is_ even in there in the first place?"

The Briton shrugged. "I don't know, there were some unpopular people on Earth in the 21st century; maybe they've gone back in time to try to prevent Katie Hopkins' birth?"

"Sir, I'm receiving a high-priority distress call from the Colonial-class ship U.S.S _Hestia_." The Navigator android suddenly notified the Second Officer after seeing what was now on the screen on his desk.

"Put it through." Said Hank, to which Markus carried out the order and played the distress call. 

" _To any Union starships within range, we're under attack by the Windermereans. We've taken heavy casualties and assistance is urgently reques-_ " The voice of the _Hestia_ 's own Captain, a male, was heard, and his sentence being cut off was guessed by the present bridge crew officers to be because of another shot from the ship that was attacking. His tone was definitely one of intense worry and attempting to get his words out as quickly as he could.

"If the _Hestia_ 's a colony ship then that means there's families onboard. Including children." Arthur shuddered at this, remembering the part where its Captain mentioned heavy casualties.

"I've got a lock on their coordinates. If we use the maximum warp speed then we should be there in approximately fifteen minutes." Markus then added.

"Set a course, let's push the hell outta the engines." The Human Lieutenant-Commander nodded his head, granting permission for them to go ahead with this newfound plan.

"What about the away team?" Said Arthur.

"We're just gonna have to hope they don't need us until we get back." Replied the acting Captain. "Launch a communication buoy so they know what's going on."

"Aye sir." The Lieutenant with the brown eyes set to work on his own desk. The Exploratory-class starship then maneuvered towards open space, away from the bioship previously in front of it, and while this was happening a small, circular-shaped shining metallic device with thin antennae attached to the top and bottom sides was launched out of the _Valkyrie_ 's underside, now beginning to emit a rhythmic echoing chirp on a loop which could be interpreted on UIFA scanners as a message left behind explaining the latter ship's absence. Soon afterwards, its nacelles came online and the _Valkyrie_ jumped to warp.

"How much further do you think this path goes?" Andrea, who was still walking along on the right half of the bioship's interior with Martin, asked. They were very gentle, but there were even some light gusts of wind floating through the air, making some strands of their hair also do this same gentle fluttering every now and then to match, and where they were right now was a slightly curving path whose surface was covered in dust and dry dirt and which was surrounded by marginally taller grass compared to the height of that which they'd first seen upon entering. Behind them, off in the distance, were a few of the mountains.

The Commander shook his head and smiled as they both looked out around themselves at the beauty of this pure, natural scenery. "I can't help you there, I'm stuck for an answer to that as much as you are."

She thought for a moment in hesitant silence about what she was going to say next. "Do you mind if I ask you a personal question, sir?"

"No, go ahead."

"Well... I'm going to try to ask this as non-invasively as I can but... how come you and Captain Kaufmann are managing to work together so well after the way things were last week?" The Security Chief looked up at him.

"You mean when I first came onboard and there was all that drama?" He chuckled to himself and scratched the back of his head somewhat awkwardly at the memory.

"Yeah." Andrea gave a nod of her head. "But if that's none of my business and you don't want to say then that's alright, so please just tell me honestly if I'm being out of line here."

"No, no, you're good." He shook his own in reassurance. "Did one of the others put you up to asking this or something?"

"No they didn't, this is entirely my own question. Me and the others have just been noticing lately how relaxed you and her have become around each other, so I thought while we're out here and nothing's happening..." She used one hand to briefly motion around them at the surrounding immense fields of gleaming, softly swaying grass.

"Well, to answer it, I suppose we're getting along with each other now because we're looking towards the future." Said Martin. "What I mean is, we talked after the whole thing that happened at Epsilon-Iota and realised the mistakes we made that caused us to split up, so we've decided to try to improve ourselves and become friends again."

"That's great - me and the rest of the crew have been glad about how things are easier now between you and the Captain, so hearing about the process behind that is another relief, too." She gave her own friendly smile.

"Yeah, we both thought since it’s in the past and since we now know what went wrong, the best thing we can do is to try to become better people together. We don’t think we’re gonna go back into a romantic relationship, but we’re moving forward step by step, and we’re getting better all the time." He beamed to himself by a small fraction, during which there were a few seconds of silence until, out of nowhere, Andrea's eyebrows furrowed as she swore she could hear something off somewhere in the distance. A noise. "D'you hear that?" The First Officer then said what she'd been silently thinking.

"I do." She could make out, after another few seconds, that it sounded like a vehicle engine and then that it was emanating from somewhere behind them, although where specifically was the factor that she couldn't tell, and neither could Martin. They didn't have to use their ears for working this out, though, as Andrea turned around - just for a second - to see that a vehicle was indeed coming towards them down the path, at a speed which meant they'd end up dead if they weren't careful. It was for this very reason that she grabbed hold of Martin's arm, him, too, seeing it at the last second, and pulled him along with her as she ran off of the path and into the sidelining grass. The vehicle, which was a jet black armoured truck slightly akin to a 21st century Jeep, swerved to a stop, into a position where it was now blocking the path and facing the area of grass that the pair had ran onto.

Two burly men climbed out of the front of it, wearing tight brown leather uniforms and having the same forehead spots that Jenna, Eve and Connor, meanwhile, had already seen.  
"Hi." Martin said to them awkwardly, getting ready to draw his pistol if need be due to one of the two men holding a smallish black assault rifle.

"May we see your identification?" The one not holding any weapons addressed him in return, with this sounding, in the process, much more like a command than an actual question.

"I'm Commander Martin Keates of the U.S.S _Valkyrie_ , and this is my colleague Lieutenant Andrea Kitan. We encountered your ship-"

"Your identification papers, _now_." The man who'd previously spoken repeated, more aggressively this time. 

"Uhh... the thing is I just found out mine's actually in my other jacket back home." The Human gave this reply in the hopes of stalling these two newcomers long enough to come up with a plan.

"And I'd rather not show you mine. I look awful in my picture." Added Andrea, for the same purpose. "Seriously, I look _really_ shiny and gross - have you ever heard of combination skin?"

This man who'd previously not been holding a gun pulled out his own pistol to match the assault rifle of his companion. "Step into the vehicle."

The Security Chief put up her hands and spoke calmly but, at the same time, authoritatively as she began to slowly approach the two. "Okay, look, if you could please just put your weapons down and let us expla-" 

There was no opportunity given for her to finish sentence, as it was at this second when the one who hadn't spoken yet, who had the bigger gun, opened fire while pointing it at her, meaning several bullets made impact with the upper section of her torso and consequently sent her falling backwards through the grass, down the slope they were standing on. All before she had the chance to fully register that it had happened in the first place.

Martin, who'd spent the last half second watching this take place, turned his head back to face the pair of men with guns. "You didn't have to do that! There was no need for you to _shoot_ her!" He yelled.

"She would've been a threat to us otherwise." The one who carried out this action responded, him and the one with the pistol making their own approach towards him.

"She didn't even _TRY_ to do anything to you!" He saw this as the moment to finally pull out his pistol from his thigh holster, which he was halfway through doing until the one with the assault rifle hit him across the head with the butt of this latter weapon, and it was done with so much force that it left him very heavily disoriented and dizzy, to the point where as Martin tried to take a swing with one of his fists at him, he missed without much effort having to be put in on this opponent's part, who afterwards whacked him the same way across the other side again, causing the Commander to fall down to the ground, fully knocked out.

Andrea, from where she lay in the grass down the slope, looked up weakly for a moment at where the two men were kneeling down to grab the unsonscious Martin by his arms, before she let her head fall back down again onto this grass, too wounded and therefore too exhausted to keep it craned up. This pair of assailants now had hold of these arms of his and proceeded to drag the male Human away towards their vehicle, his boots and trouser fabric making the accompanying shuffling noise against the dust-covered path as they did so.

"We've always suspected that there's more out there beyond this place, somewhere hidden but only a stone's throw away, but you're the first living, breathing proof we've ever had of that belief." Jahavus said to Jenna, Connor and Eve, who had given him their explanation and were sitting opposite him at the long table in the middle of the Reformers' barn with the remainder of this group's members also being seated around them, at this same table. Sat immediately next to Jahavus on his right side was Mailia, his wife who was also the Reformers' deputy leader, and their twin daughters Nixavi and Czeloni, who were a part of the portion of members who were young adults, were there as well, also sitting near to their father. 

"Which means we have to take them to the city, so we can finally show everyone we were right all along!" Czeloni, who was a young woman with long dark blonde hair, light hazel-green eyes, spoke up. "With this kind of solid evidence there's no way they'll be able to deny that!" 

"Exactly." Tomilin added in agreement. 

"Really? And how do you think your parents will react to this news?" A man from further down the table responded, addressing this teenager who'd just concurred with Czeloni. 

"The population needs accept the truth, otherwise when this ship collides with the star, everyone including them is going to be killed." Said Connor in reply, before addressing Jahavus again, now with slightly quirked brows and with his head tilted to the side by a tiny fraction, "Why would anyone purposely choose to ignore an incoming disaster like this when there's a chance to rectify it?" 

"Some people just refuse to accept a plain, simple truth because that plain and simple truth happens to put them in the wrong." This leader answered. 

"Hamelac's such a man, that's for certain..." Nixavi commented. She had shoulder-length middle brown hair and her father's same brown eyes. 

"Who's Hamelac?" Said Jenna.

"Eskolas Hamelac is the First Guardian of the Order of Naaru, our so-called just and definitely mighty leader." Replied this same one who'd spoken her thoughts out loud a second ago. "He and dad have apparently always had a rivalry going on since they were children, but it's more than just that: Hamelac makes all law and is seen as the living embodiment of the law, too, and he has a ban on anything and everything regarding places outside of our own world - he's only heard rumours and hearsay about us and our meetings, but if he knew of the Reformers' existence he'd have us all put to death." 

"So... he's a dictatorial git?" The Captain who had posed the question asked another as her own remark.

Now it was Nixavi's turn for her brows to furrow. "'Git'?" 

"It's a regional term used by the people of where Miss Kaufmann is from to describe an unpleasant person." Explained Jahavus, making this Human in the blue uniform jacket widen her eyes somewhat and look at him in surprise while he smiled knowingly at this reaction.

"How did you know that? I was just about to give an answer along those same lines." 

"He has the ability to sense people's thoughts." Mailia elaborated. "Jahavus can predict what someone's about to say and do by what's going on in their mind, like a form of precognition, and it means he can also sense the nearby presence of family members." 

"A telepath." Said Eve in wonder. The Visterians had the ability to sense people's feelings and emotions, making them empaths, and so did the Kzarmiloids to a lesser extent, but the Union had never encountered any races whose members possessed telepathic abilities. "Do all of you have that power or is it only Jahavus specifically?" 

"I'm the only one who we know to have it, or to be, as you put it, a telepath, but there's been quite a lot of speculation on whether or not there _are_ others like me out there and they're just hiding from Hamelac and his soldiers." 

"It wouldn't be surprising if they really were hiding - the Order of Naaru's scripture says that people with psychic abilities are typically a sign that those people are going to bring about some kind of great change or accomplish another achievement like that, as if the universe has got something big lying in wait for them." Said Czeloni. "And I can say with tons of certainty that Hamelac isn't the type of person who you'd call a fan of change." 

"One last question: Tomilin's mother mentioned something to us called the Underland." Eve then began to put forward her own query. 

"And you want to know what it is." Said Jahavus. 

"You're not going to stop with the thought-reading are you?" She chuckled lightheartedly, which he returned.

"To be fair, though, it was still easy enough to discern without having to sense what was inside your head." 

"The Underland is said in the scripture to be a place where blasphemers against Naaru are sent after death; a sort of dark void which they come out of to haunt living people who've committed sins." Answered Tomilin. 

"It hardly sounds like sunshine and rainbows, then." Jenna spoke. "Also, I've got one last thing of my own to ask, just out of curiosity: does your power to read thoughts mean you can find out _everything_ that's going on up in there or is it just what I'm about to say and the actions I'm planning on doing?"

Jahavus smiled; it was a common question he'd been asked before by the other Reformers when he first formed this group several years ago, but that didn't mean it was one which was now boring or an irritation. In fact it actually amused him slightly. "It _is_ just what you're immediately planning on doing and saying, so don't worry, you're safe. I can't sense memories or daydreams or anything of that nature." 

"Oh, good. I was worried that me and my colleagues here were going to now suddenly be able to be subjected to just full-on mind-reading or something." The young woman with glasses showed her own smile in relief at this. At this moment, her communicator chirped, to which she pulled it out of her pocket and flipped it open. "Kaufmann here, go ahead."

"It's me..." Came a weak reply with Andrea's voice on the other end of the line.

"Are you alright?"

"I've been shot, ma'am." Needless to say, this got the attention of all three away team members there in that barn, along with that of most of the Reformers around them. Some light grunting and painful gasping noises could also be heard as the Security Chief was probably shifting her body position. "A couple of men took Commander Keates and I think they knocked him out. I'm transmitting my homing signal now..."

"Alright, we're on our way. Just stay as still as you can and we'll be with you soon, Lieutenant." The Captain quickly put her device away again and looked towards Eve and Connor, nodding with her head towards the doors. "Come on."

"I'll go with you." Said Tomilin as he got up from the table.

"And me as well. Those men your friend was just talking about are most likely soldiers working for Hamelac, which means you should possibly have an extra pair of hands with you in case we run into them again." Jahavus added, and then he, the one who'd spoken previously and the _Valkyrie_ trio all got up to leave together at a brisk pace, on their way to wherever Andrea's signal was coming from as quickly as they could.

Martin was immediately hit by a feeling of immense dizziness and disorientation as soon as his eyelids slowly slid open, made even more immense when he soon began to realise that his body seemed to currently be in motion. After a moment he vaguely managed to deduce that he was in a vehicle, most likely the one which the men with guns had turned up in a few minutes ago, especially when he saw the positioning of the windows around him; with his dizziness still present but now fading somewhat, he then found that he was lying in the back of the truck with his face up towards the ceiling, his arms on either side of his body but with his left forearm draped slightly over his torso.

"And now I ask you this: do you embrace the word of Naaru?" He managed to faintly hear someone shout outside as the truck pulled to a stop - a man, to be specific.

"YEAH!" Came the even louder response of a large crowd.

"Are we united as a collective people by his truth and benevolence?" The man outside yelled out to this crowd again, during which Martin used the hand connected to this formerly draped-over-torso forearm to gently massage the back of his head where he'd been knocked out, wincing to himself almost silently.

"YEAH!"

"And what of those who question that benevolence? Those who deny his gift to us, and to the universe?" The voice addressing the horde suddenly became much more solemn and serious, as opposed to his previous tone of enthusiasm. This horde responded to this particular question with grumbles of almost palpable contempt. "Can they be allowed to live among us? To grow, and fester, and to CHALLENGE HIS WORD?" The tone changed back again to the enthusiasm, although this time it was a more aggressive kind.

"NO!"

At this point, Martin was now standing as he was being forcibly dragged out of the back of the truck by the two men, who were each keeping a firm hold on his arms and shoulders to, also forcibly, ensure his cooperation. He now managed to get a good look at the man calling out to the group of about a hundred people gathered in front of him, additionally all standing up: he was a man appearing to be somewhere around the age of his early to mid sixties, with short light grey hair combed back at the sides, who was standing on the front steps of a flawlessly polished white building with pillars at this front area, meaning this building looked barely dissimilar to a courthouse. This man was wearing a long-sleeved tunic which had a high collar and which nearly went down to his ankles, its colour being mostly a teal so dark it was almost black while the rest of it consisted of some grey parts here and there, also a dark shade of this colour, meaning the tunic was partially two-toned. A black belt went around his waist on top of it, having a circular solid bronze buckle in the middle. He had his head held high; by the way he was addressing the crowd, Martin theorised that he had to be a leader of some kind.

"Bring him out." The man spoke to someone behind him, this person currently being unseen, to which the horde roared out cheers of excitement. The _Valkyrie_ Commander watched as a man and a woman, both wearing the same leather uniforms as his duo of captors, stepped out of the building's front doors, appearing to be dragging forth a young man who struggled against them to no avail, during which the man on the front steps who'd just spoken caught a climpse of this Commander, silently looking at him from several meters away with an expression in his eyes which briefly displayed curiosity but, at the same time, a sense of hungering, as if Martin showing up had somehow brightened up his day or presented him with some kind of shiny new opportunity. After this brief look, the man on the steps returned to the matter at hand, motioning towards the young man who'd just been brought forth and who was now standing to his right, still being held in place. "This man is one of a group who call themselves the Reformers. He has been charged with heresy: he has distributed blasphemous and hateful material right here, within this very city! He openly defies THE BENEVOLENCE OF NAARU! HE IS YOURS TO SENTENCE!"

There was nothing Martin was able to do to prevent what happened next. The pair who'd been restraining the young man, much to the evident pleasure of the crowd based on how loudly they were clamouring again, abruptly threw him out into the members of this crowd, who instantly proceeded to gather around him in a frenzy and throw as many punches as they could. He was passed around them like a rag doll, being relentlessly slapped, kicked and punched, all while the man on the steps watched it impassively.  
He looked over towards Martin and his own two guards again, motioning with his head towards the doors behind him. These two, at this non-verbal order, obediently began dragging Martin towards them, bringing him to the building.

Roughly thirty seconds or so later, they arrived into a large office, where there were two additionally big windows on each side and which emanated a slight chill inside. At the other end of this office sat a tall black armchair behind a dark wooden desk, upon which various papers were laid out, a lamp with an immaculate dull yellow-coloured shade standing on the right side of the top of the desk. The man who'd been shouting to the crowd outside was in this office, standing near to the desk, having arrived himself only a few moments beforehand. There was a red rug also decorating the area of the floor that sat underneath it.

"He was carrying this." The guard who'd been the one to knock Martin out approached the man, handing him this Human's pistol.

"Thank you. You're both dismissed." He nodded in gratitude, to which the two then walked out of the room. "Please, sit down." He turned his attention towards Martin, motioning with his left hand towards one of the two shorter black armchairs sitting opposite each other around a small wooden table with the same colour as the desk.

This Human pursed his lips slightly in disgust. The man before him had just put an amicable edge into his tone of voice, but it didn't make up for what had taken place outside a minute ago at all. "I'll stand if that's okay with you." He replied tersely. "Who are you, and why have you brought me here?"

"My name is Eskolas Hamelac. As for why you're here, I simply wish to talk with you; to find out where you came from, as you visibly seem to not be from this place." He nodded his head again, this time being towards the younger man's UIFA uniform and the lack of spots on his forehead. Martin, in return, had also been able to spend the last few seconds getting a better look at Hamelac now that they were standing more closely to each other; he had blue eyes, he was about three inches shorter and the way he carried himself put across a dash of superiority which mostly diminished the friendly tone he'd been trying to use a moment ago. He put Martin's pistol down behind him, onto the desk.

"Why did you kill that man out there?"

He looked back with mild surprise, raising his hands so that they were both visible. "I haven't killed anyone. Do you see any blood on my hands?"

"You were the one who incited that mob to beat him to death, so you still killed him." Retorted Martin.

"The people do as they wish, and today they wished to carry out the word of Naaru." Answered Hamelac calmly.

"I don't know who that is, or what you're talking about, but your two goons who dragged me in here shot my friend. She could be lying out there dead for all I know. So you can either let me go right now, or there'll be trouble - take your pick."

"Trouble?" Repeated the man in the tunic, walking up closer to Martin.

"Yeah." The latter narrowed his eyes.

"From whom? Other friends of yours?" Hamelac returned this eye narrowing once they were only a foot apart from one another. When this question was met with only a cold silence, he added darkly, "I said _sit down_. You're going to be our guest for a while."


	6. S1E2: If the Stars Should Appear [3/3]

Jenna, Eve, Connor and the accompanying Tomilin and Jahavus were making their way up a grassy slope some distance away from the Reformers' barn, out in the wide open area near to the dusty path, following the homing signal coming through to Jenna's scanner. This area of this open grassy space was engulfed in shade which was being casted by other slopes of similar size around it.  
Eventually, this Human holding up her scanner who was leading the way saw on its screen that they were now very close to the source of Andrea's signal, which was confirmed when she looked away and saw a pair of UIFA uniform boots sticking out from some of the grass at the top of the slope up ahead. "There she is."

The five, now that she was within sight, ran over to Andrea, who was lying down flat on her back with her right hand gently clutching her left shoulder and the near area around it, which were embedded with three bullet holes that had dark green blood caked around them - one of the bullets was on the threshold between the shoulder and the chest. Her eyelids were slightly closed and her chest was going up and down as she tried to, and was failing to, keep the immense pain under control.  
"Hey." She spoke out, in a weak tone which matched this partly-closed state her eyelids were in.

While the others stood and watched in concern, Eve knelt down next to her and immediately set to work carrying out an analysis of Andrea's torso with her medical scanner. "She's lost a lot of blood, but as we just saw she's definitely still alive. And it looks like these bullets haven't hit any vital organs; if she was fully Human then she'd most likely be dead by now." Xelayans had their hearts in the place where Humans had their livers, so not only was the liver in a slightly different place in the case of the former but also, more importantly, it meant that wounds to or near the chest were much less fatal. This was lucky for Andrea, whose Xelayan half took up very nearly all of her internal body chemistry.

"Thank God for the Human half not deciding what goes on in here." Andrea herself voiced this point, momentarily smiling to herself. 

"Can you heal her?" Said Connor.

"I can certainly try - we got to her before these wounds had the chance to become irreversible." Eve put down a grey case she'd been carrying by a black strap over her right shoulder, this case having a large white caduceus symbol on one side to match the smaller grey one on her uniform jacket's badge, and, after opening it up, removed from it two different items, one of them somewhat resembling a gun in the way that it had a handle with a "trigger" and the other having a similar sort of design to a scanner. She then inserted a small glass vial containing a clear fluid into the main section of the former of these two, before addressing her patient, "I’m going to try and remove these bullets, but first this is just going to numb the pain for you." At this moment, she proceeded to hold the device containing the glass vial to Andrea’s neck and pulled the "trigger", upon which the limbs of this Security Chief immediately began to relax somewhat and she felt the pain slowly easing away, as if it were mud and dirt that was being washed off of her body and down to the floor in the shower.  
Now that this was done, Eve held up the other device, the one which looked a little bit like a scanner, over the area of Andrea's chest where the wounds were located, to which a few seconds later Jahavus and Tomilin's eyes subsequently widened as, one by one, the dim energy beam of light that filled the space between patient and medical instrument, with Eve's guidance, gently plucked out the bullets not unlike a magnet. After this event of them each being plucked out, they were collected into the device's compartment designed for containing foreign objects like these.

"Could someone give me a hand?" Eve then leaned downwards, putting it away, and gingerly grabbed a hold of Andrea's other arm, the one on the undamaged side of her body, to pull her up just as carefully. Tomilin soon obliged, grabbing the Xelayan-Human’s other hand.

"Will she be alright?" Asked Tomilin.

"There’s still some tissue damage that I’ll have to deal with when I get the proper chance, but yeah, she will be." Responded the CMO, then speaking this time to Andrea herself, "The best thing to do now is to just let your left arm rest, it’ll help the recovery along."

"Thanks." Said Andrea. Her voice was still weak and sounded as if most of its energy had been drained, but there was an edge now gradually coming back to it that made it additionally sound slightly more confident and steady.

"The only thing we have left to tend to now is the Commander’s disappearance." Connor spoke up afterwards. "Jahavus, you said earlier that the people who took him were soldiers working for Hamelac?"

"Yes; Enforcers are their official title." This man who was the oldest out of the six of them there replied in confirmation. "They've probably taken him to the city for interrogation."

"Would we be correct in presuming he's well-guarded?" 

"There'll be a lot more Enforcers around him, yes." Nodded Jahavus. 

"It sounds like we're going to have to put together a rescue team." Said Jenna. "Connor, go back to the shuttle, contact the _Valkyrie_ and tell them that we need backup as soon as possible."

"Yes ma'am. It's not that far away from here, so I should be back within four to seven minutes." The Science Officer began to walk off in this direction, back towards the doorway separated from the one connected to the shuttle by a metal catwalk. Within roughly around three of these minutes, this catwalk had been trodden on back the other way as he promptly made his way back into the much, much, _much_ smaller craft via the still open back hatch. However, as soon as he entered into the shuttle, he looked around in front of him in perplexity: the Exploratory starship seemed to have vanished, with the communication buoy they'd left behind being the only thing floating along in the space where it had been. He pulled out his scanner to decode whatever message was on this buoy, typing on its keypad with his thumb before, a few seconds later, removing from his pocket his communicator and flipping it open. "Connor to Captain Kaufmann."

"Go ahead." Answered Jenna on the other end. 

"It appears that the _Valkyrie_ 's gone, ma'am."

"What? What do you mean gone?"

"According to the communication buoy they've left behind, they received a distress call. They've also said that they'll return as soon as they can." 

"What kind of distress call?"

A long way away, in another area of space which was en-route to the newly-discovered Union planet Sigma-Delta which was due to be settled on by the inhabitants of the U.S.S _Hestia_ , this Colonial-class starship was being defended - while contributing with whatever firepower of their own that they had - from a Windermerean scoutship by the _Valkyrie_ , which had been doing so for roughly around the last ten minutes. The latter swooped down towards the scoutship, both being about equal in terms of size, and dodged around it, taking part in the exchange of phase cannon fire.

"Several of the warp drive injectors have been compromised, sir. We can't take another hit on the starboard side." A young Ensign, a Zolan male, who was manning Andrea's station on the bridge in her absence informed Hank as the room shook and a few sparks fell from the ceiling from the impact of the Windermerean ship's own phaser fire.

"We've done a lot of damage to their engines too - maybe if we concentrate our fire there we can get them before they get us." Markus also added.

"We can't, we've gotta take out their weapons first!" The Lieutenant-Commander barked back over the noise of another impact.

"There's no time; focusing our power on their engines is our best chance! Sir, trust me on this." This android Lieutenant turned around to look at his and his crewmates' acting Captain, currently taking Jenna's place in what was normally her own chair.

Hank remained silent for a few moments, his expression reflecting the uncertainty nestled deep inside his mind like this emotion's mouthpiece, before turning to his left and addressing the Zolan in Andrea's chair, "Transfer weapons control to Lieutenant Markus' station, Ensign."

"Aye sir."

"Arthur, take us directly underneath them!" Said Markus, to which this other man nodded determinedly and then, after grabbing hold of it, pushed down on the engine lever in front of him on his desk, to which the ship propelled forward and, with some more steering guidance from Arthur, went at its highest non-warp speed straight towards the scoutship, the Navigator next to him arming their missiles during these short few seconds. They swiftly breezed on past the front of the Windermerean vessel and underneath it, until eventually, they’d reached the optimum position for their plan, near to the back of this enemy craft. 

" _Now!_ " The Helmsman yelled to Markus, whose left finger had been hovering in anticipation above the button which would fire a volley of these missiles, pressed this finger down onto this button now that his wait for the signal was over. Half a dozen of these self-propelled weapons shot out of the _Valkyrie_ , soaring through the empty space outside before making contact with the section where the enemy's engine was located and tearing away large fragments of the hull in that area in the process. Debris was left drifting around in this moment of destruction's wake, spread around in a similar fashion to how the stars in the night sky are scattered haphazardly.

"Their engines have been knocked out, and it looks like most of their weapons have been, too." As the android who'd orchestrated this spoke again, these words made him involuntarily smile. 

"Yes!" Cheered Arthur, who simultaneously jumped up out of his seat - also an involuntary reaction - although a moment later he became aware of this physical action and slowly sat back down again, now feeling somewhat embarrassed and awkward.

"Good job Markus." The Second Officer, nodding his head slightly in approval, also showed his own small smile. "Ensign, how's the _Hestia_ doing?"

"They're reporting a few injuries, but no fatalities."

"Engineering to bridge." The voice of a certain other android, a certain female one, suddenly came through.

"Go ahead North." Answered Hank, pressing the arm rest button to do so. 

"We took a lot of damage to the starboard side warp injector - it's gonna be a while before we can get going on our way back to the away team." This Chief Engineer informed.

"How soon d'you think we can go?" 

"If I get everyone from my team down here working on it then we should be able to make the warp jump and go back in fifty minutes, maybe forty." North replied. 

"Okay." Hank acknowledged. "I guess all we've gotta do now is hope those five aren't in any trouble." 

It was at this second, back deep inside the colossal bioship, when the gloved, clenched fist of one of Hamelac's guards collided with the side of their current prisoner's face for the fifth time in the last few minutes. 

"Let's try this again, shall we?" This commander of the guard, and of the other three also standing there with him, said to Martin. The latter was tied down to a chair in the centre of the room, in front of the dictator and his lackeys, with his arms behind the back of the chair and his shins fastened tightly to its front legs, both being done with rope that, as he'd found out, inflicted one of this universe's greatest evils when he tried to squirm around in his futile efforts to break free: friction burns. "Who do you work for, and where are your friends?"

"I already told you, dumbass." Martin hissed back with almost palpable hostility, soon recovering from the punch he'd just gotten. The area of his cheek underneath his left eye was bruised, his lower lip on the other side had a cut stretching down across it vertically, and his hair, the part of it which normally hung over most of his right eye currently being halfway back to the side, was dishevelled. "Our ship encoutered yours drifting in space, and we're trying to help you before you end up falling into a star and getting burnt to a goddamn crisp!" He said this sentence slightly more slowly, in the same manner one might explain something to a young child.

"And _I_ already told _you_ you're lying, because there is no such place." Hamelac's own voice, while calm, contained a small dash of this same hostility and dropped by a few volume notches for his next repetition of the question. "Where are your friends?" 

"Getting busy with your mum." 

At this response, the interrogator snapped his fingers, upon which the guard who'd punched Martin a few seconds ago immediately did the same again, also once again jerking the Human's head back to one side by doing so. "Where. Are. Your. Friends?" Hamelac took a step closer to him and leaned down slightly.

Martin momentarily took a breath to ignore the stinging pain across his face before turning his head back to look up at the older man, his own voice's volume falling down so that it was now just as quiet. "Okay. Okay, fine, I'll tell you." There was a pause for a beat as he brought forth a 21st century TV series reference. "This little town in Indiana called Hawkins; my friends are there." He leaned forward himself ever so slightly and lowered his volume even further to nothing more than a whisper. "But please, for your own sake, don't hurt the girl in the pink dress and the blonde wig." 

He experienced a feeling of satisfaction as he saw Hamelac's features faintly twist into a subtle scowl, but this feeling was short lived as this latter one of the pair of them snapped his fingers once again and then there came with it another hard punch to the face.  
  


"Here we are, the Capitol Chamber." Tomilin addressed Andrea, Connor, Eve and Jenna now that, while this was taking place, these five and Jahavus were all standing together on the city street that this building perched on. The four from the away team had been given simple civilian tunics to wear and had the natives' forehead spots painted onto their own heads, both of which being in the hope that they'll blend in and therefore have a much better chance of being able to rescue Martin, with Andrea and Connor both also wearing bandanas, to hide her Xelayan eats and the LED on his temple. Jahavus, who both he and Tomilin speculated could be recognised due to his and Hamelac's rivalry being well-known, had the hood of his cloak up around the sides and back of his head as a result of this speculation. "If Hamelac's got your friend, he'll be in there." 

"What's the plan?" Said Andrea. 

"I don't know, I suppose we're just going to have to play it by ear and make it up as we go along." Answered the Captain. 

"Foolproof. I like it." Eve commented to her friend with joking sarcasm, to which she got a look of a non-verbal sigh from this younger woman, and after this brief look was when the group of six walked up to the Capitol Chamber's front steps from across the street, still sticking together. 

"Oh my god, _Steve_?" Jenna spoke to the guard standing at the door which was at the top of these steps, initiating her play-it-by-ear "plan". "It's me! It's Jen, from uni! It's been a while, how are you?" 

"Step back from the door." The guard replied stoically. 

"When I say a while I mean a _while._ How long has it been now? Six, maybe seven years? And just look at you, you're a guard now! How long have you been guarding?" She motioned up and down with both of her hands at his uniform while still maintaining her faux-excited tone. 

"Step back now." 

"What kind of talk is that to an old friend? Come here and give me a hug, you silly bloke!" Within the space of just one second, she moved closer to the guard and just as he was reaching for his own weapon, she pulled out her pistol and pulled the trigger while pressing it up against his lower torso, in a covert way so that no passers-by would see this white gun. His now unconscious body instantly fell down onto her right shoulder, which she struggled and strained against as she tried to drag him with her through the door, which Jahavus and Connor wasted no time in opening now that the man defending it was incapacitated. "There we go, that's what I was looking for." She said, maintaining the pretence of her simply wanting a hug and trying to hide her laboured breathing at dragging him along. 

"I guess it really was foolproof." Remarked Eve in mild surprise, her, Andrea and Tomilin also going through the now open front door of the Chamber and closing it again behind themselves. 

  
"You're very resilient." Hamelac, in his office, was still looking down at his captive in the chair. "Do you know what my colleague here is holding?" 

Martin looked up, his face even more bruised than before after the last minute or so, to see one of the guards in the room examining what appeared to be a syringe. It wasn't like those that the medical technologies of the Planetary Union made use of, which were jet injectors, and this one instead was the hypodermic kind. The kind which was used on Earth centuries before, and which was the one out of the two that caused pain upon injection. "A scale model of the thing between your legs?" 

"Oh that's good, get it all out." Said Hamelac, in mockery of the Human's retorts. "It's a fluid that we've found, from our previous uses of it, to be a rather effective truth serum. It attacks the body at a minuscule scale and still causes immense pain. Imagine that: every single nerve in your body feeling as if it's being punctured by a tiny little pin." After this revelation, during which he enjoyed the feeling of the last sentence as it rolled off of his tongue, he addressed one of the other guards to his left. "Remove his jacket."

"Pretty forward of you." Martin got out another sneer upon hearing this order. "But I'm afraid you're _really_ not my type, pal. To start with, my type is _women_." 

"You won't be so vociferous when you begin to feel its effects, I can assure you of that."

"Oooh, 'vociferous'! That's a big word - do you know how to spell it?" There was another remark from the captive, who currently felt like he was on a roll with these, while he tried his best to struggle and squirm around again now that his jacket had been taken off and the guard with the syringe was attempting to go for his currently exposed right upper arm. In only about two or three more seconds, though, this one that had removed the jacket reached out and firmly held his right arm in iron-solid stillness, upon which the one with the needle finally managed to stick it into the area underneath his shoulder and push down.

It was nearly immediately after the fluid had entered into him when Martin's fists began to clench and his hands as a whole began to convulse against their rope bindings behind the chair, and his teeth clenched to match this. His breathing became heavier, the pain suddenly sparking and surging through every fibre and atom of his body making stifled shouts and yells rise at the back of his throat.

"All you need to do is to tell me where the others are, and then the antidote is all yours." Hamelac said to him, holding up another syringe picked up from off of his desk. "And you'll finally see how much good your little comments did you. The choice is yours." Martin gritted his teeth. This pain was making him feel like he wanted to tear his own skin and his own eyes off of his body, and then his bones, and then his nervous system, so that there wouldn't be any host material for the fluid to attack anymore. He glared up at the dictator only for a second, because he was then forced to focus on this inescapable, intense physical torment that also forced him, in the process, to let out a cry that he hadn't registered the presence of in his throat. It was like thousands of the tiny little pins his captor had just mentiond were tearing through his body and out the other end all at once, slicing him up from the inside. "What, no jokes? No remarks anymore? You were so amusing only a moment ago! What's the matter, are you feeling more shy now all of a sudden?" 

The UIFA officer's only reply to this mocking was another, marginally louder roar of pain.  
Luckily for him, there was an abrupt interruption. Hamelac and his guards all had their attention drawn to the door in front of them at the other end of the room, which, without any warning, was ripped off of its hinges from the outside by a female figure. A woman with emerald-green eyes and dark brown hair.

The three coworkers and fellow Valkyrie away team members with her emerged into the office just as quickly, Jahavus and Tomilin both on their flank, and these three took down the guards inside in what was only a blur of time, leaving a shocked Hamelac as the only opponent still conscious.

"Martin, what's happening to you?" Jenna asked in concern as she and the other five ran to the still convulsing and writhing captive, who was still unable to speak right now.

"What did you do to him?" Demanded Andrea, who marched over to the dictator straight away and proceeded to effortlessly pick him up by his neck with only her right hand. " _Talk!_ "

After a moment of giving the twenty-eight year old a deadly glower, he spat back in a strained voice due to how tightly she was holding his neck, "Give him this." He opened up his flat hand which was holding the syringe containing the antidote, Eve then quickly grabbing it and, more carefully, jabbing its tip into Martin's right upper arm and pushing down. As soon as the contents of this one entered into his bloodstream, his writhing and convulsing slowly began to cease and he took a gulp of air.

"Oh Jesus..." He managed to get these words of relief out in between his now steady breaths.

"Eskolas." The Reformers' leader addressed Hamelac with palpable disdain.

"Jahavus." He said in reply, lacing it with this same mindset. "Still running around in the shadows, I see."

"Well you hardly left me any choice." Jahavus didn't blink once as he still glared up at him, knelt down next to the chair where Martin was currently being set free from his rope bindings by Jenna, Tomilin and Andrea. "In my daughter's own words, you're not the type of person who someone would call a fan of change."

"You must be Mr. Hamelac." Jenna, also looking up at him as she managed to get one of Martin's hands free, spoke to him. "Nice name - just joking, it's _not_."

"You have a pretty morbid way of greeting newcomers. Especially since all we're trying to do is help you." Eve spoke her thoughts out loud and held up the now empty antidote syringe as proof of her point.

"Why could we possibly need your help?" He sneered in reaction to this.

"Because, in actuality, this entire world is a massive bioship adrift in space, and approximately four months from now, it's going to get caught in the gravitational field of a star not far from here and will ultimately be pulled further in and destroyed." Connor walked up a little bit closer towards him while providing this explanation. "We came here from another ship after we first discovered this one earlier today-"

" _Do not_ blaspheme in these chambers." The dictator held up his right hand to silence the android, expressing this sentence with thinly-veiled impatience. "This world was created by our lord Naaru, and his creation is all."

"You can pretend all you want but you know the truth!" Tomilin yelled back in Connor's defence. "Or you at least suspect it, because why else would you have their friend tortured like this and others killed?" He briefly motioned with his left hand towards Martin. "You do believe that life and other worlds beyond this place exist, that we're not Naaru's sole creations, you just want to keep the truth from us regardless."

"Well?" Andrea pursed her lips at this and, like the others, looked at Hamelac expectantly for an answer.

His own lips tightened, one of his fists simultaneously clenching. "Is it possible that there's more to this universe than what we see? Fine, yes, it _is_ possible!"

"Then why the bloody hell won't you let us _help you_?" Now was the time for Jenna to kick up her own vocal volume. "We can try to repair this ship!"

"To do as you say would decimate our whole way of life, and this world is not ready for that kind of change."

"'Decimate'. Another long one." Martin made another acrimonious comment, standing up from the chair.

"You mean _you're_ not ready to give up your control over us and the rest of the people." Jahavus snapped, after which the sound of his voice escalated into actual, full-on shouting. "Which part of the fact that we're all going to _die_ are you finding so hard to grasp?! These people can _save us_ , Eskolas! Doomsday is coming, and the sooner we learn to change our opinions to suit the facts and not the other way round, the better we'll all be!"

"I _will **not**_ destabilise a system that has kept order for thousands of years!" His calm and self-restrained demeanour melted away.

There was a pause for a beat. "Very well." Jenna spoke, ending this pause whilst, at the same time, she was sneakily reaching her right hand downwards, towards where her pistol was located in a back pocket of the civilian trousers she was wearing. "I suppose we'll be on our way then, but you'll understand that we don't want you sending your thugs out after us, so have a nice nap." Before he had any chance to fully register it was even happening, she drew her pistol and fired it at Hamelac, making him drop to the floor in an instant.

Branches of leaves and other shrubbery akin to Earth ivy were drawn back from something that was revealed to be a metallic keypad of some sort, embedded into a wall of this same material. It had been a few minutes since the still currently battered and bruised Martin's rescue, after which he had retrieved his confiscated pistol and Jahavus and Tomilin had led the now reunited five from the _Valkyrie_ away team to an area somewhere in the grassy hills relatively near to where these five had first emerged into the bioship in the first place, although this area was sheltered somewhat from the "sunlight" by some trees. There was some kind of rectangular hatch underneath this keypad, also embedded into the metal, which looked similar to the door of a circuit breaker.

"This is what we wanted you to see. It's a forbidden place, so none of us have ever known what it is." Jahavus, who was the one holding these leaf branches and bits of shrubbery out of the keypad's way, told them.

"It looks a bit like the doorway we first came in from." Said Andrea, looking at it and trying to work out how they were going to get through it if this was indeed another door.

"I agree." Added Connor as he stepped closer to it. "But unlike that of the first doorway, this keypad seems to still be functioning. If I can gain access to the internal circuits, the code should be easy to obtain." While he spoke, he leaned downwards to open the circuit breaker, its contents of wires grouped together being significantly more clean-looking and less rusted compared to the exterior that had just been opened. He reached his left hand out, as deeply into the circuit breaker as he could, and grabbed on to one set of these wires, the synthetic skin on that hand disappearing and leaving only the white plastic alloy surface underneath, which the entirety of his body beneath this synthetic skin was made of as per every android. The reason for the skin disappearance on his hand was because of this plastic of his hand conducting information and streams of variables directly to the CPU chip in his head, from within the bundle of wires. Numbers were coursing through his “brain”, so as to speak. Cofactors upon cofactors surged across the inside of his mind, his LED flickering yellow again to indicate this data exchange. And then he finally factorised out the number sequence he was looking for. "Code confirmed." He took his hand out now that he had the information he needed and closed the circuit breaker again, the artificial skin making a reappearance, and methodically tapped the right sequence into the keypad. 

The surface Andrea thought to be a door, which it was embedded in, opened up to the sides from the middle, revealing another catwalk, also lit at the sides like the first one. With Tomilin and Jahavus looking up at their now cavernous surroundings in wonder, the group of seven made their way across this new catwalk, which appeared to lead to another open doorway.  
"It seems to be an elevator, ma'am." Connor observed once they'd reached this other end, the seven now standing in it.

"Up or down?" Said Martin, noticing the presence of two buttons, one above the other, on an area of the wall to the right side of the lift's door.

"Let's try up." Jenna gave her answer. "Is everyone alright with going up?" There were replies to this of 'Yes', 'Yeah, that's fine' and non-verbal head nods that went around the rest of the group, after which Martin leaned forwards to press the upper button and, with that, the doors slid shut and all seven of them could feel the ground subtly shifting upwards beneath their feet. There was a larger, more sudden feeling of movement to begin with, most likely due to it not being used in several centuries or even millenia, but after that the rest of the journey upwards was mostly smooth.

There was a silence in there amongst the group, to the point where, a few seconds later, Eve decided to break this silence, feeling its awkwardness descending upon them. "Have you got any plans for this coming weekend?" She turned to Andrea, who was standing behind her. 

"Not much, it's my cousin Stella's birthday on Sunday so I'm going to give her a call on that day, but that's the only thing I can think of from the top of my head so far."

"Cool. What about you, Jen?"

"Um..." This Captain thought for a moment or two, and then referenced her and the Chief Medical Officer's mutual liking for anime, "Well, I've still got some episodes left to watch of that comedy from the 2000s, _Ouran High School Host Club_ , so maybe you and I could get together in my quarters on Saturday night to have a drink and watch a few if you're free?"

"Coolio." Nodded Eve. "Coo-cool. Coo-coo-cool..."

Martin rolled his eyes lightheartedly and craned his head towards Jahavus and Tomilin, who were at the back. "She's always awkward like this in elevators."

"Ah." Said the former of this pair.

Soon after this exchange, there was a cease in the lift's motion as the doors then slid open again now that it had reached the highest floor level. The group stepped out into a large-ish room, also bathed in a faint yellow-orange light, which strongly resembled, based on the dimly-lit consoles around it and the viewscreen over at the front, a particular crucial part of every starship...

"I think this is some kind of bridge." Andrea spoke these thoughts of the other four from the away team out loud. 

Tomilin, meanwhile, had just finished walking over to this viewscreen and gazing out at the blackness outside, and the tiny white pinpricks in this blackness which were stars. "What is that?"

"That, kid, is space." Answered the Commander, him and the others in the group additionally going over to the viewscreen and standing alongside the teenager. 

"I used to sometimes lie awake in my bed picturing what it'd look like, in my mind, but it was nothing like this..." His eyes went slightly wide at the enormity of it all.

"How far does it extend?" Jahavus, showing this same reaction in his own eyes, asked.

"No one really knows." Said Eve. "But we think it probably goes on forever."

"Captain, I've accessed a video recording left behind by this bridge's previous occupant." Connor, who was standing at one of the consoles with his fingers on it, notified.

Jenna nodded in response. "Let's see it."

The android briefly set to work again on the console, and then, after a moment, the image of a man with the bioship natives' same forehead spots appeared on a screen in the bridge's left wall, there being two of these screens on either side. His short hair was ever so slightly messy on the top but generally neat, and was predominantly dark blonde but with a slight ginger tint, with his eyes being a bright blue and his face possessing a faint full stubble which matched his hair. In addition, since this image of him was being shown from the shoulders upward, he looked like he was wearing a dark red uniform with a collar that went halfway up his neck and with three small triangles that were most likely rank pips on either side of this neck area on the uniform. He had a somewhat rugged look about him, like Hank, but was simultaneously clean-cut on the whole. The typical look associated with authority figures.

_**[Background score to be played while reading what's underneath: https://youtu.be/VFUkM5i7SZA]** _

"If you're watching this," He began to speak as soon as the video recording appeared on the screen, during which Jahavus could have sworn that he felt a tiny twinge in the back of his head just for a split second. The Reformer Leader immediately regarded this as strange, as he usually experienced a sudden feeling of some kind in his head when his telepathy sensed the presence of nearby family members. "And if you're hearing my voice, this is my final pre-recorded transmission and Captain's log." The seven all watched the screen and listened intently as the man on it continued, "I've spent the last few days weighing up every future possibility, and one of those is that this recording will most probably be found at some point by people from out here among these stars, so if another possibility of our journey from here on out being quite a long one is also true, then it's only fair that I owe you an explanation for our presence out here."

As the others continued listening to his every word in silence, he gave this explanation after a moment of a reminiscent pause. "Almost two years ago, the sun of our home, the Baccar D System, turned against us." At this second, Jenna and Martin both had to resist the urge to point out the similarity between the sound of this system name, Baccar D, and the sound of an American liquor's name: bacardi. However, they realised just as quickly that what was about to come in the explanation could possibly end up being a serious topic, so this was what helped them with holding out against this impulse. "Over time, our sun intensified and grew, until ultimately, it became a red supergiant; myself and a handful of my fellow captains were the ones who first noticed its outer layers beginning to expand. The beginning of this change from how nurturing it had been previously. I can still remember children's cries as our homeworld grew hotter and hotter, along with its colonised neighbours..."

The rest of his body didn't move, but a poignant look crossed over his face and his eyes shifted downwards slightly, towards the ground, making Martin and Jenna glad that they hadn't made the above-mentioned bacardi reference. "So, when the chances of our homeplanets being laid to waste were continuing to grow, we outfitted our largest and most advanced bioships - such as this one - for being able to evacuate us, and we fled into open space, where we could search for a new home together, and where we could thrive far away from the destruction. This particular ship, now three months ago, was unexpectedly hit by a powerful ion storm which caused us to become separated from the other ones, and we've also been unable to restart our engines since. The other ships out there could be facing this same issue, but there's currently no way for us to tell. We're now marooned out here, and unless we can find a way to repair the damage, it appears that this ship's going to be our home for a while, so this is the reason for this particular recording being my last: I need to take the time to truly be with my own children and my wife Xasenia, now that we're going to seemingly be here for the forseeable future. Our air onboard is recycled, so we won't suffocate, and as this is a self-contained ecosystem, our food and water supplies are sustainable for thousands of years if need be." His eyes were now showing a new look, this one being of optimism, and the corners of his mouth fractionally curled upwards into a small smile to match this. "I know that we've faced a lot, and that we've come up against another challenge, but what I also know is that there's still hope in sight yet. We'll still find our new home someday. This is captain Zevrath Naaru signing off."

And then the image disappeared, leaving behind only the screen in its previous state of blank blackness.

"Naaru..." Jahavus repeated the surname of the man in the recording in awe. "All this time, he was a mortal being. A man who'd led his people out of a cataclysm and carried on believing that the best was yet to come..."

"And then the people of the society that emerged here evolved and grew until they forgot about their origins, and the fact that they were even onboard a spacecraft." Added Connor.

"How's it possible to forget something like that?" Eve pondered.

"It's possible to forget _anything_ if enough time passes, Doctor." This Science Officer who'd spoken previously replied. "Many if not all of the Planetary Union's member species homeplanets are still unsure of at least small parts of their own history. But the damage to this ship is quite rectifiable - an estimate of forty-eight hours is how much time those repairs should take."

Jenna sighed, a little bit wistful after hearing the origin story. "Forty-eight hours. After two thousand years of drifting through space, it could've been fixed inside of two days..."

"And there's also one more thing: according to the schematics available, it looks like a section of the of the upper surface on the hull is retractable."

"You're saying this thing's got a sunroof?" Martin queried for confirmation.

"Precisely, Commander. It's presumably for simulating night."

"What's night?" Said Tomilin.

The Captain, deciding that the best way to answer his question was to actually show this answer to him, nodded her head while still looking at Connor. "Open it, Lieutenant-Commander."

"Aye ma'am." He tapped a few more buttons on the console, after which there was the sound of a large metallic rumble as, with this sound making them all look out of the viewscreen at the hull section below, this segment was slowly starting to open up vertically from the middle not unlike the way the lift they came out of opened a minute or so ago, leaving the populace and the lands beneath safe from the unforgiving emptiness of space but shedding its daytime roof with the artificial sun, and instead showing the stars and darkness of the sky outside. Until now it had been rather a lot like how Yixia VII had an eternally light side in contrast to its perpetually dark one, but now it was time for the people below to see this nighttime sky for the first time in their lives. They all found themselves looking upwards in amazement without being able to do otherwise as darkness slowly slid over the entirety of the lands, standing together in unity at this sight, including Hamelac, who had only just woken up and was somewhat unsteady on his feet but felt like he was experiencing a sensation of a brand new, previously unknown kind of wonder. He stood among the people outside the Capitol Chamber, many of whom's jaws began to drop by a few degrees, including his own.

"If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown?" Jenna quoted the words of a poet which had just sprung to mind, still observing the retraction of the "sunroof" with the others around her.

"But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile." Added Andrea, who smiled in recognition.

"You know Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lieutenant?" The one out of these two women who wore glasses turned her head to the left to look at her.

"I read that quote of his somewhere a few years ago, yeah. I guess it just stuck with me."

"Communications are also now clear; we're being signalled by the _Valkyrie_." Connor spoke up again. "They've returned."

Jahavus approached the Human with the mousy hair. "So, what do we do now?"

"Well, we're going to contact the organisation we work for, the UIFA, and they'll send a training crew here to this ship to help reacquaint you with it." Now it was Jenna's turn to show a smile. "Then you and the others onboard will be back in the driver's seat in no time."

"And wherever you go next is up to you." Martin nodded, mirroring this same expression. "We'll also try to see if we can get the UIFA to help you with finding those other bioships out there.

Tomilin and Jahavus both soon found that these smiles were contagious. "Thank you, all of you. For everything." Said the latter.

"Dont thank us; we just gave back what was already yours."

"What you gave back to us was our future." Tomilin replied to the Commander. "That definitely deserves some thanks."

Several minutes later, once the shuttle that the away team had arrived on had taken them back to the _Valkyrie_ , this starship jumped to warp, leaving the bioship now due to be repaired in a few days' time. During this, Jahavus and Tomilin continued to stand there on the bridge, looking out through the viewscreen and still not quite believing the vastness on the outside of said viewscreen.

The former of these two had his hands held together while both of his elbows rested on an area akin to a windowsill unerneath its glass, pondering on the mental twinge he'd felt earlier when Captain Naaru's final video recording first began to play, as if the two had some kind of a connection to each other.  
Was he this Captain's descendant?  
As he'd already thought earlier, the only times he'd ever felt anything like that before was when he telepathically sensed nearby members of his family, and this twinge happening at the moment when the video started happened at too precise a time to be a coincidence. He additionally considered, though, the possibility that it was indeed a coincidence and that it meant a grand total of nothing, but another thing he realised was that he didn't have to get to the bottom of it all in that day, or even in the next few days: now that his, the other Reformers and the rest of the entire populace's futures were open and so far unwritten books, he could take all the time in the world. They could all take as much time as they wanted to do what they wanted.

"Where do you think we should go, we can get moving again?" Tomilin walked over to this same windowsill-like surface underneath the viewscreen glass and stood to Jahavus' right side, proceeding to rest his own elbows.

The older one of the two males shook his head. "I have no idea, speaking honestly. I don't know what the future holds exactly, but I do know that we can do anything and be anything we want to be now." His smile from earlier reappeared, which Tomilin returned afterwards. "We're going to be alright."


	7. S1E3: Pria [1/3]

On a mid afternoon in the mess hall of the _Valkyrie_ , a few of the ship’s main crewmembers were gathered, along with about a dozen or so others, after the previous episode's events now three days beforehand. The UIFA crew Jenna had mentioned who would be sent to the Naaru bioship for showing the inhabitants the ropes to controlling the ship themselves had arrived earlier that morning, and had sent a message to the above-mentioned Captain informing her of this; the message also said that Jahavus and Tomilin had agreed on a name for their people with the rest of the Reformers and some of the other inhabitants of the ship: Narulians. After all, their original species name had been lost with time since two years ago, when the Baccar D System solar disaster happened in the first place - the event which destroyed their original homes and forced them out into space - and they knew as well as you and I do that calling themselves "Baccar D System natives" was a bit of a mouthful. So, as a result, they decided that they might as well make their new collective title a homage to Captain Zevrath Naaru himself, the man who'd been one among the few who discovered the impending cataclysm, and whose ship was probably the first to wake up to the reality of a universe outside after those two millenia.

However, I fear once again that, like in this previous episode, dear reader, I'm straying off topic from the present moment that little bit too much again. In the current afternoon, as the ship still had no specific mission at the moment and was therefore continuing with aimless exploration, Jenna, Andrea, North, Connor, Arthur and Hank and a little bit over a dozen other officers were sitting next to each other in neat rows in the mess hall, facing the wall on the right side of the room. On this wall was a rectangular screen projection outline which North herself and some of the other engineers had mounted up, the projection on it being an episode of a 1980s Earth sitcom from Britain. 

These crewmembers gathered were having a viewing afternoon.

" _What happened? Has he broken anything?_ " The fictional character known as Rodney Trotter asked in concern at this point in the episode that they’d now reached.   
Yes, this sitcom they were viewing was an episode titled _Tea For Three_ from the timeless classic called _Only Fools and Horses_. 

" _They reckon the aerial’s beyond repair._ " Another of the characters, Trigger, replied, to which the crewmembers gathered either smirked or actually laughed to themselves to match the reaction of the episode’s live audience. 

" _No, no, I mean Del. How’s Del?_ " 

" _You’d better ask him yourself, Dave._ " As Trigger spoke this next line in the episode, another character, the pub landlord Mike Fisher, wheeled the main character Derek "Del Boy" Trotter, Rodney’s older brother, into the room in a wheelchair. Del was very visibly battered and bruised after, earlier on, Rodders had tricked him into going hang gliding and he’d subsequently crashed, and he now had a plaster across the bridge of his nose and his neck was in the support of a brace. 

" _I see you got home safely then, Rodney._ " Commented Del Boy, to which some of the crewmembers in the audience laughed out loud again while the rest, which included Arthur and Jenna, grinned and shook with silent laughter, all of which causing Connor to feel mildly confused. 

"Sir?" He leaned slightly to his left as he whispered this word to Hank. 

"Mm?" 

"I don’t understand the humour of this." 

The Second Officer quietly laughed for a moment out of satire at this. "Jesus Connor, have we gotta explain _everything_ to you? I thought androids not knowing about humour was a thing that stopped like a century ago or something." 

"It is true, sir - that's why I've seen that Lieutenant-Commander North and Lieutenant Markus comprehend this better than I do, but I think during a majority of the leisure hours of my life since activation I've been what people might refer to as socially inept." Said the Science Officer.

"In other words you're kinda a loner most of the time and don't have much experience around people who aren't other androids, so the way they understand emotions and the stuff you can't download hasn't rubbed off on you?"

"Correct." Connor nodded, before fully explaining the part of the OFAH episode that he didn't recognise the comedy of. "From what I've learned about late 20th century Earth medical technologies, they had a significantly lower success rate for being able to effectively fix injuries such as the ones that this main protagonist Del Boy has obtained, meaning such injuries would most often lead to lifelong paraplegia. And those sunburns on the deuteragonist Rodney's face inflicted by Del Boy earlier on could also lead to serious complications such as skin cancer, not to mention causing him extreme pain."

"Yeah, that's why it's funny!" Hank was now chuckling to himself again. 

The one with the brown eyes who'd spoken previously narrowed his eyes and tilted his head at this, both being to a tiny degree but nonetheless putting across his still growing confusion. "But to derive amusement from the pain of another living being is sadism, isn't it?" 

"Humour is sort of a case-by-case principle." There came a voice, another male one, to be specific, from a few feet away to their right, making them both turn their heads to look at the source of it. Standing there behind the cocktails bar was Viyan Launil, a Caphramoid man who'd recently reached the age of thirty and who worked as the _Valkyrie_ 's resident bartender. He had glimmering yellow eyes and equally bright short lime green hair which was neatly swept to the left side of his forehead - this species he belonged to were known for their vivid eye and hair colours, and were additionally capable of changing both at will along with the length and style of their hair as a whole. This was why they were regarded as 'partial shapeshifters', and there was even a code in one or two of their religions that the monks and nuns of said religions were to refrain from changing their hair and eyes like this, in the hopes of remaining as their gods had made them and therefore becoming closer to said gods in the process. What the Caphramoids also had was a rather keen sense of hearing, which was how this bartender had managed to pick up what Hank and Connor were saying just now. "Like, for instance, if a man tries to do parkour and what ultimately happens to him is that he ends up smashing his testicles, _that's_ pretty funny." Viyan was smiling as he gave this example, and he, too, was trying to keep his voice down while the rest of the episode was still playing.

"He's right, that _is_ funny." Said Hank in agreement, also finding himself involuntarily smirking. 

"If you're looking to better understand this kind of comedy, maybe you should try some practical jokes." The Caphramoid recommended. 

"Alright. How do I go about that, Viyan?" Said Connor. 

"I'm gonna show you one so you can watch and learn, but _when_ I do that is for me to know and you to figure out when it happens." The Human with the grey hair was still smiling, although it was now a cunning and sly one, making the android curious as to what he meant exactly.

"Jen, we're getting a distress call up here." The viewing and this conversation between the three men were both interrupted by the sound of Martin's voice coming through to Jenna's communicator, to which she momentarily sighed slightly at having to pass up the rest of a perfectly good _Only Fools_ episode before taking it out of her pocket and flipping it open. 

"Where's this distress call's signal coming from?"

"Markus says it's from a rogue star that's pretty much right in our neighbourhood; it's only five minutes away at the middle warp speed level." Said the First Officer. 

"Very well, we'd better set a course for it and get going. We'll be up in a minute." Replied Jenna, after which she flipped the communicator shut again and this was a clear signal for all of the officers there who'd been gathered for the OFAH viewing to get up and head on their own ways to their stations. 

Soon after the _Valkyrie_ had jumped to warp, it was only a few seconds before, everyone having gotten to their stations around the ship by now, it dropped back out again upon reaching the location of the distress call, due to them having gone at the highest safe warp speed. And there it was before them. A sun in all its solitary, destructive glory. You see, the term 'rogue star' was the name given to suns which had broken free from the gravitational pull of the galaxies they'd originally come from, and after it had left this origin galaxy, the star would continue to gradually drift on through space until, in the end, it eventually drifted into the galactic void. Apparently these things really do exist. This also meant that it was possible for an unsuspecting ship to be caught off guard due to the rogue star's location and position never remaining the same. 

"The signal's coming from that comet." Markus reported, as another thing that was right in front of them outside the front viewscreen was an asteroid seeming to be hurtling directly towards the star. 

"It's a sundiver." Commented Martin. 

"A what?" Andrea, turning around from her console, asked in unfamiliarity of this term. 

"It's a comet that gets caught in a star's gravitational pull, and from there it basically makes a kamikaze dive until it gets incinerated by the heat." 

"I've done some finer pinpointing and it looks like the source of the call is coming from the surface of that asteroid." Arthur added whilst still looking down at his own console. "It's a crashed ship." 

"Open a communication channel, Lieutenant Kitan." Upon hearing this, Jenna gave this order to Andrea. 

"Aye ma'am." There was a few seconds of typing on her desk's buttons. "You're on." 

"Unidentified vessel, this is the exploration starship U.S.S _Valkyrie_ , do you read?" 

For a moment or two there was only static on the viewscreen, before an image of another young woman in the blue uniform jacket of the UIFA's Command division, this one looking somewhat panicked and having somewhat dishevelled shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes and a small gash on her right cheek underneath her eye, appeared. "This is Captain Pria Lavesque of the Mining-class ship U.S.S _Hadur_. I'm in trouble." Her accent was an American one, and the background of the ship she was in shook from the asteroid's ongoing kamikaze dive.   
Also, the thought currently going through Martin's mind was how gorgeous she was.

"Just stand by Captain Lavesque, we'll get you out of there. How well is your life support working?" Said Jenna. 

"It's still functioning, but it's getting pretty hot in here." Replied the _Hadur_ 's commanding officer.

"Connor, can we use the tractor beam to get her ship out of there?"

"I wouldn't recommend it, ma'am." Said the brown-eyed android. "It's partially embedded in the surface of the comet, so retrieving it via the tractor beam could compromise its hull integrity." 

"How long have we got left before it falls into the star?" 

"The star's gravity will cause the comet to break apart in eight minutes and forty-two seconds." 

"We've got to hop to it, then." She turned her attention back towards Pria on the viewscreen. "I'm sending a shuttle over to come and get you."

"I'll keep the door unlocked." The other Captain gave a small smile, most likely as a way of calming herself, before she closed the communication line on her end, making her image disappear. 

"Mr. Doyle, do you think you can pilot a shuttle and get her out?" 

"I can certainly try, ma'am." The Helmsman turned around and nodded. 

"I'll go with him." Added Martin, then making him the next subject of Jenna's attention.

"Just be careful." She told him. 

"I'm always careful!" He looked back at her and chuckled

"Strongly disagree, but you can believe what you want." Jen shrugged with a smile, after which he and Arthur both got up from their chairs and walked as fast as they could out of the bridge and towards the lift at the other end of the corridor. 

The _Hadur_ was one of a specific type of small Mining-class starships where transports of non-radioactive materials could be transported while being manned by a minimal crew complement - just one person if necessary. And a couple of minutes after Arthur and Martin had set off from their bridge stations, they were now barrelling through the space between the _Valkyrie_ and the comet in one of the latter ship's shuttles. 

"What we're doing is rather dangerous for a Second Officer to join in with." Arthur, sitting in the pilot seat, said to the other man next to him. "I'm not questioning your authority or doing anything of that sort, but are you sure you'll be safe and careful like the Captain said, sir?" 

"Yeah, I'll be fine." Nodded Martin in reassurance to the Lieutenant, although the word 'Yeah' seemed to have been spoken in what can definitely be called a pretty high pitch compared to the rest of his sentence. 

"Why did your voice just get so high pitched?" The Briton's eyebrows quirked. 

"It didn't." 

"It did, I'm sure of it. You went ' _yeah!_ '" Arthur raised the pitch of his own voice by a lot of notches to demonstrate what he meant. 

"No, it's all good." 

"I'm serious, what was the high pitch..."

"It's fine I've got this." This time, the Commander spoke this entire sentence in a very deep pitch. 

Soon after this exchange was when they were getting close to Pria's crashed ship on the rocky surface; its descent towards the rogue star was causing very heavily strong wind gusts which made the job of docking the shuttle to the available hatch a bit more difficult. However, despite this obstacle of him feeling like there was an invisible hand out there somewhere trying to force them back, Arthur nonetheless managed to connect to the _Hadur_. 

"We've got a minute to get the hell back out of here, so let's go." Said Martin, both of them immediately getting up from their seats again at the earliest opportunity and making for the now open doorway, entering into the mining ship. It was as if it were a different planet altogether - while the inside of their shuttle was still pristine and fully functional, the interior of the U.S.S _Hadur_ was populated with dim lighting similar to a subterranean cavern, numerous loose wires dangling from the ceiling, and, for a couple of the times when the environment as a whole shook, sparks flying from said wires. And the other Captain was right about the temperature: as soon as they entered, they suddenly felt humid and muggy, especially on the non-clothed areas of their skin.

"Captain Lavesque?" Arthur called out for any sign of Pria once the pair had now ran several meters down the corridor ahead, flinching and turning away when another burst of sparks flew from a set of wires next to him. 

"I'm here!" The in-person source of the woman in the viewscreen call suddenly showed up in another doorway off to their right. 

"Is there anybody else onboard this ship with you?" Asked the First Officer. 

"No, it's just me." 

"Let's go." The Helmsman and the newly-appeared woman didn't need telling twice. All three of them made for the end of the corridor that they'd just ran in from, having to steady themselves against the walls for as short a time as they could achieve during the shaking moments, but they soon made it back into the interior of the shuttle, this other passenger now with them. 

"Doyle to _Valkyrie_ , we've got Captain Lavesque! We're on our way back!" Arthur exclaimed after sitting back down in the pilot seat and opening a communication link to their own ship which they'd come from, this raised volume being caused by the urgency throbbing through every fibre of himself to get out of there. 

"I'll have Eve waiting on standby in Sickbay." Acknowledged Jenna, still back on the bridge. 

"How much time do we have left?" 

"Twenty-four seconds, Lieutenant." Answered Connor's own voice. 

"Hold on!" The British Human shouted to Martin and Pria, after which there was the same amount of strain involved as there was during the docking a minute ago but he got them loose from the _Hadur_ , which was now gradually being ripped apart by the winds like paper, and they began the journey back to the _Valkyrie_ , attempting to leave behind the imperilled asteroid just as quickly as they'd ran out of the now mostly-destroyed mining vessel. 

However, only a moment after this bigger, Exploratory-class one came into view and they thought they were out of the woods, the strain against Arthur's piloting made a comeback - only this time, compared to the first occurrence, it was amplified tenfold.  
"Uh-oh..." This man said to himself in dread. 

"Define 'uh-oh'." Martin, too, could feel his eyes widening as he gave this response, and so could Pria. 

"It's the star's gravity: the comet was already rather close to it so we're getting pulled in as well!" 

"Markus, can you get them with the tractor beam?" Jenna said upon hearing this, urgency creeping into her own tone of voice. 

"I'm doing it now ma'am." Replied the Navigator. 

The three shuttle inhabitants gritted their teeth as they were torn backwards in the grasp of the rogue star's gravitational field, despite Arthur's desperate efforts to prevent this. It was a good thing that seatbelts existed, as otherwise the force of this would have thrown them against the wall over to one side.   
And then, another few seconds on, it just stopped, as if someone had flicked a light switch. 

"I've got you in the tractor beam." Markus' voice told them over the communication link. "I'm bringing you back now."

"Thanks for saving our necks." Martin let out a relieved breath of air, smiling slightly in this same relief. Arthur and Pria both also sank that tiny bit lower in their chairs courtesy of this emotion. 

"Agreed - good work, Lieutenant." Jenna nodded in concurrence; she was glad that, thanks to how quickly he got this beam online, two of her officers would live to see another day. 

"What were you doing trying to land on that comet?" Eve put forward a question to Pria, examining the latter a few minutes on from the rescue for signs of any injuries. She was perched on one of the beds in the _Valkyrie_ 's Sickbay, sitting still as the Hungarian Doctor ran a scanner up and down her torso, with Martin and Jenna both additionally standing in front of her. 

"I was on a solo mining expedition a few light-years away from here; a Windermerean battlecruiser found me - it was obviously doing a little exploring of its own - and I eventually got away but it drained a ton of my power, so after my sensors detected that little comet, I decided to land there so I can hide from the battlecruiser and try to make the repairs I needed." She explained while Eve had almost finished shining a miniature torch into her eyes to check their dilations. 

"Well, you're lucky we were in your neck of the woods." Replied Jenna, smiling. 

"Very lucky. Thank you, Captain Kaufmann." Pria returned this expression. 

"Okay, everything seems fine - there’s no sign of infections or any other injuries apart from the bruises." Eve informed her patient, putting away this miniature torch back in her pocket and turning around heading off to also put away the scanner she’d used.

"Thanks Doc." The blonde one out of the two Captains called out.

"Our Security Chief’s going to assign you to guest quarters, and then we’ll get going in a few minutes and drop you off at the nearest UIFA station." Said the other one. 

"Sounds great." Nodded Pria gratefully. 

"Today must've been a hell of a day for you." Martin joked. 

"Oh you got that right." She chuckled, returning this same lighthearted manner in response to his remark. "I'm gonna need a hell of a drink before the day's done."

"I'm hosting a little cocktail party thing for the rest of the senior officers in my quarters tonight; you're welcome to join us if you want to." Jenna offered cordially. "It's at seven this evening."

"Thanks, I'd love that." The smile made a comeback.

From there, it was another relatively slow afternoon while Arthur and Markus set a course for the Union space station which was nearest, Hagalaz, and the _Valkyrie_ had then jumped to warp speed again, although there was no particular rush to get there, so this level of warp speed was somewhere around the middle - neither going at a snail's pace nor going absolutely flat-out.

"It's six-thirty; I'm going to get changed and get everything ready." The Austrian-British Commanding Officer told Martin, getting up from her chair on the bridge.

"I'll dismiss the others in ten minutes." He nodded his head while providing this reply.

"Wait, Jen, just hang on a sec before you go." Hank said and turned around in his own chair upon noticing that she was currently halfway across to the back of the bridge, walking on her way out.

"Why?"

"You'll see, just give it a minute - he's gonna come back any second now." A cunning smirk appeared on his face.

"Who's coming back?" Jenna put forth another question, now growing more and more confused, although this was cleared up slightly when she remembered, upon noticing his chair in particular being empty, that Connor was absent.

"Here he comes." The Second Officer whispered, during which his smirk was growing and he was therefore forced to cover up his mouth with his left hand as this other Lieutenant-Commander was seen coming around the corner out in the corridor behind the back of the bridge. For a few seconds while he walked the distance of this corridor and entered into the room, there was a lot of quirked eyebrows going around because of them not seeing anything out of the ordinary about him. And then, when he sat down at his station and had his back to them as a result, the thing Hank was smiling about hit the rest of the bridge crew in the face: on Connor's back, getting itself draped over the back of his chair as he sat down, was a piece of A4-size paper which had a large upwards-pointing arrow drawn on it, with words in all capitals written underneath this arrow that said,

**I'M WITH**   
**STUPID**

Everyone instantly made the connection between the still silently laughing Hank, whose hand was still rammed over his mouth to keep in said laughter, and the presence of this paper on the Science Officer's back, and they continued to stare at the latter for several more seconds: to their surprise, he seemed to be completely unaware of the paper and was going about his business at his desk like it was just another day at the office.  
Out of the corner of his eye, though, Connor caught a brief glimpse of Jenna giving him this look, which made him turn around in his seat to see that she was just one of several others with this look on their faces.

"Ma'am, can I ask why everyone's focusing their attention on me? And why is Lieutenant-Commander Anderson laughing?" The brown-eyed male android, now experiencing confusion of his own, queried.

"You've got a little calling card taped to your back, Connor." Answered Jenna, to which his eyes then narrowed themselves ever so slightly in this same growing confusion as he reached up onto his back with his right hand, pulling off the I'M WITH STUPID paper sheet as soon as he felt its presence so that he could hold it up and read it for himself.

"Gotcha!" Hank exclaimed, finally removing his hand and allowing his laughter to become less confined, especially at the continuous perplexity residing on Connor's features.

"I don't understand." This latter one of the two shook his head by a few degrees.

"It's a practical joke, like what we were talking about earlier with Viyan! I told you I was gonna get you at some point!"

"You put that on him?" Said Andrea.

"Yeah, I had it folded up in my hand when we passed each other in the hall a few minutes ago. I was waiting for the right time to slap it onto the back of his jacket while he wasn't looking, and then I just took my chance before he went off the rest of the way to the stellar cartography department." The grey-haired Human was practically beaming with pride, and then turned his attention back towards this prank victim. "Now you've gotta get me back."

"By orchestrating a practical joke of my own on you?" Connor asked to confirm what he was presuming.

"That's right, but you've gotta do it when I'm least expecting it - the aim of the whole thing is to catch me by surprise, when my guard's down."

The one in the green uniform jacket nodded in understanding, soon showing a small smile of his own. "I see. I'll try to adhere to those perameters, sir."

Hank tried to distract himself from the tiny little sensation of fear sparking into life deep inside his gut: God only knew what Connor was going to end up doing to him in this experiment of the latter to better understand the meanings of humour...


	8. S1E3: Pria [2/3]

In Jenna's quarters, at the senior officer cocktail party to which their newcomer had been invited, the feeling in the air was a relaxed one indeed. All ten attendees wore casual/semi-formal clothing, getting out of their UIFA uniforms, while this above-mentioned Captain had set a loop of numerous piano jazz songs to be played in the background. On a table nearby, cocktail snacks to match this occasion were laid out, including cheeses on sticks and small, square-shaped pieces of fruits from various Union worlds. 

"Well, whatever else might happen I can certainly say the company has a habit of keeping things from getting too dull." Pria, currently in the middle of a conversation with Arthur, Martin, Hank and North, said lightheartedly, with an equally light chuckle. Her apparel was a knee-length black dress with a somewhat feathery forearm region, making her look a little bit like a raven in Human form, and with a high collar. 

"Altair Mining Industries operates out by the frontier, doesn't it?" Asked North, referring to said company which the other Captain worked for. Altair Mining Industries, often shortened down to simply AMI, was an organisation which was usually the leading party in the collection, transport and monetary trades regarding many different materials within the Planetary Union, one of which even being Dirilium, and although it was a separate entity, AMI answered directly to the UIFA and to the Union government itself, which is why ship officers working for both the UIFA and Altair Mining Industries wore the same uniforms. 

"It does sometimes, yeah." Nodded Pria. 

"It sounds like we're not the only ones who take a stab at going into new territory." The female android commented, motioning slightly towards the others around her with her head. 

"Have you come across any new peoples during those missions in the unexplored space?" Arthur queried, this question being spawned from the curiosity of an Exploratory-class ship crewmember like himself. 

"Once or twice, but from what I've found out they have some pretty wild cultures. There was this one race I met a couple of years ago when I was trying to secure the mining rights to a moon nearby, where for every business negotiation the people involved in that negotiation are supposed to take off everything on their torso and show their naked chests!" Pria laughed to herself as she recounted this tale. 

"What do they wanna do that for?" Hank also chuckled and quirked his eyebrows at this ludicrous cultural idea before taking another sip from the glass of whiskey he was holding. 

"Apparently it's meant to be a show of good faith; it's supposed to tell all the other parties involved that they're going to be completely honest and not deceitful."

"And do their women have... uh..." The Second Officer put forward another question, but the only difference was that he asked this one more awkwardly, pointing hesitantly with his free hand at the chest region of his body. 

"They do." Replied the woman in the black dress, smiling in amusement at this reluctance in his voice. "So as you can probably imagine it was... quite a hairy deal in particular, but in this case if you want to talk literally I guess you could say it was anything _but_ hairy!" She then put into her mouth one of the snack pieces from the stick in her right hand: a Voldorian fruit called yuguara which had a tangy taste that crackled on the tongue. 

"Captain Lavesque." The host herself suddenly appeared from off to the side, walking towards this group of five in a slightly shorter royal blue dress with long lace sleeves and giving this amicable greeting. Hank and Martin both wore button-up white blouses with long sleeves, the difference between the two being the latter wearing a light grey jacket over his own, whilst Arthur was clad in a dark brown polo neck sweater, also possessing long sleeves, and North wore a thigh-length dark burgundy tunic with short sleeves and with black jeans underneath. 

"Good evening, Captain Kaufmann."

"We were just being told about one of her exploits." Arthur caught his and the others' own commanding officer up to speed. 

"Ah! An Altair Mining Industries mission!" Said Jenna. "What went on?" 

"It might be a tough job for them to explain even if they tried - it's still a little surreal for me explaining it myself, too." The other Human woman joked. 

"So then, tell us a bit about yourself personally: where are you from originally?" Queried the one with the mousy hair. 

"I was originally born in New York, but after moving there when I was three I spent most of my life in New Jersey." Said Pria. 

"You're kidding - I'm from New Jersey too!" Martin spoke up, a smile surfacing on his face. 

"Really?" The expression of the one who'd spoken previously mirrored this. "What part?" 

"Princeton." 

"Trenton!" Pria briefly used one hand to motion towards herself in reply. 

"Sounds like we were practically neighbours on each other's front porches!" 

"Have you ever been to Liberty State Park?" 

"A couple of times, yeah." The First Officer nodded, pausing for a moment afterwards to drink from his glass. "I think the first time was on a school field trip back when I was ten or eleven; me and a couple of my friends who also came ditched the group and went through the fence at the edge to dip our feet into the water. When we realised how far up ahead they'd gone without realising we were missing we panicked and ran after them barefoot, and the dread we were feeling when we then had to get them to take us back to get our shoes..." He responded with a small laugh at the memory. 

Early the next morning, which followed after Martin and Pria had spent most of the rest of the night before talking with each other in this same manner, Hank was sitting alone in the chair at the desk in his quarters. He'd only just sat down after putting down onto the floor a bowl containing the daily dog food meal for Sumo, who happily walked over to said bowl in the corner of the room and began to gratefully tuck in.   
The Human himself, meanwhile, was sitting a few feet away with one forearm resting on his desk and his other hand currently being around the now mostly empty mug of coffee which was also on top of the desk surface, the index finger on this latter hand lightly tapping in thought. 

After another second or two, he retracted the hand from around the mug and used both for typing on the keypad in front of his computer, reaching the personnel database of Altair Mining Industries after another few moments. 

"Pria Lavesque." He spoke after activating the vocal search function on this database, following which some all-capital words appeared in the middle of the screen:

NO MATCH FOUND  
PLEASE TRY AGAIN

Hank's eyebrows furrowed slightly. "Pria Lavesque." He gave it another go just in case there was some kind of error, either with his computer or with the loading process of the AMI database, and spoke his words a little bit more clearly this time.

NO MATCH FOUND  
PLEASE TRY AGAIN

His still furrowed brows now raised themselves somewhat. 

However, this confusion soon morphed into worry and an internal mini-panic when, at that second, he caught a glimpse of the small clock numbers in the bottom-right corner of the screen: **07:56:42**.  
"Christ!" He impulsively cursed to himself and got up from his chair, quickly moving across the room and into his bedroom to put on his uniform. Something must have gone wrong with his alarm clock and caused it to wake him up that morning later than it normally did. 

He threw open the wardrobe doors mounted into the wall on the left, the right wall housing a large window, so as to begin the process of changing out of his nightwear and into his UIFA jacket, undershirt, trousers and boots, but his eyes were instantaneously hit with a rather big surprise.   
"What in the actual..."  
Every single item of clothing and footwear, including the half a dozen copies of the parts his uniform consisted of, was gone, leaving only empty space and unoccupied coat hangers in there. 

" _Connor!_ " He shouted a few minutes later in the doorway to the bridge, making everyone, including this android he was addressing, turn around to look at him.

"What is happening...?" Martin asked in perplexity, him and Jenna both leaning around their chairs to have this glance: Hank's current attire was his nightwear, which was a dark grey shirt and shorts that were of a darker shade, and he was also currently barefoot. 

" _He_ took all my clothes!" The oldest of the senior officers pointed his finger at Connor, who was sitting in his own chair and observing the result of this act that he'd carried out. "Is this meant to be your prank to get me back?" 

"That's correct, sir - I got you." The Science Officer displayed on his face a small smile in satisfaction due to having successfully stuck to the criteria he'd been given for how to effectively pull a practical joke on Hank in return for the I'M WITH STUPID paper that he was the victim of. 

"Well where the hell _are_ they?!" This newest prank victim yelled back. 

"I've hidden your clothing items from you in an undisclosed location for the time being, so that I could amplify the humour of the practical joke." 

Andrea bit her lip to stop herself from laughing out loud at all. 

" _Why_ did you have to go and do this? Do you have any idea about the kind of stares I got from some of the new Ensigns on my way up here?!" Said Hank. 

"I've been told that that aspect of what would happen next is what makes a practical joke even more amusing, sir." Connor replied calmly, at which point Andrea couldn't restrain herself any longer. Laughter that was some kind of cross between a faint giggle and an actual laugh escaped through her lips. 

"Did you have something to do with this, love?" Arthur, whose attention was now diverted towards this Xelayan-Human, asked. 

"I might've kept some surveillance on the corridor outside Lieutenant-Commander Anderson's quarters from here while Lieutenant-Commander Connor went ahead with taking his clothes to make sure he wasn't coming his way..." She grinned back at her boyfriend. 

"You were in on this too?" It was the growingly disbelieving Hank's turn to also address her. 

"Don't be hard on her for it. I'm the one who gave her permission to do that." Jenna said, smiling cunningly. 

"And _you_?" He then looked back at Connor. "Am I gonna find out that my goddamn _dog_ was on the inside and helping you out with this?!"

"I don't understand why you're so irritated, sir; you told me that I had to carry out the joke when you weren't expecting it, and I've adhered to that directive. And I was told my Captain Kaufmann that causing embarrassment for you in this manner would serve to make it more humorous." There came another of his tiny sideways tilts of his head, him now being somewhat befuddled. 

"Alright, alright, in all fairness you probably should give his clothes back to him before the day's done: I'll let you keep them hidden from him until this evening." Chuckled Jenna. "And as for you, Hank, like I said, don't be too hard on him or Lieutenant Kitan. In the end this is basically just a bit of harmless fun among colleagues." 

Hank's lips tightened, behind which he momentarily gritted his teeth. "Fine." With that, he walked through the doorway and fully onto the bridge, sitting down another second later in his chair and turned his head away with an almost inaudible huff when Connor gave him another smile. 

"I guess you could say that if he did hold this against them then at least he'd be clothed in righteousness." Commented Martin after a few long seconds of silence, making Andrea, Connor, Jenna, Arthur and Markus all break out in either fresh smiles or small snorts of laughter. Hank swiftly turned around in his chair to glare at these other six around him. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" The taller, bespectacled American held up one of his hands in defence, putting some chuckling of his own to use. 

The door chime in Andrea's own quarters rang out an hour or so later.   
"Come in." She responded, not looking away from the screen of her computer, upon which were everyday security personnel reports that were by far the most pedestrian aspect of her job but that every Security Chief in the entire Union was obligated to read and check through. Nightshade was curled up into an oval-shaped mound of jet black fur in her lap, currently half asleep. Mounted up on the wall behind her desk was a landscape painting of Paris at night-time which included the Eiffel Tower on the left side.

After this answer was given, the door a few feet in front of where she was sat at her desk slid open, and in stepped none other than the latest prank victim. 

"Hey sir! What can I do for you?" Said Andrea, now looking up at him and smiling to herself at the sight of him still not wearing his uniform and being stuck in his nightwear. 

There was silence for a second as Hank picked up on this smile. "Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Anyway, I came 'cause I wanted to ask if you could do a favour for me." 

"What is it?"

"I kinda need you to check Captain Lavesque's quarters." 

"Check for what?" Asked the hybrid in slight confusion at this request. 

"I don't exactly know yet." Said Hank, feeling a tiny sense of awkwardness himself at this vagueness he was putting across. "I've got no idea what it is specifically, but I think there's something up with her - I did a check earlier on Altair Mining Industries' worker records, and it looks like they've never had an employee called Pria Lavesque."

"Maybe there's just been an oversight and she hasn't been added to the list yet? I mean we all know how Altair's got employees coming and going all the time - they're basically _famous_ for how sloppy their personnel records are!" The brunette suggested. 

"She said last night that she's been working for AMI for at least a couple of years." The Lieutenant-Commander soon shot down this theory. "If it was an oversight then someone would've had tons of time to fix it by now." 

Now it was Andrea's turn to put forward a momentary silent pause, hers being in thought. "Okay... if I do search her quarters for you then it's going to be a little bit tough for me in the rules department, because Security Chief or not I can't go snooping like that willy-nilly without a good enough reason. Unless you order me to." 

"No, it's not an order, but can't you just come up with some bogus security reason for the search?" He replied with another query, his voice then turning especially serious. "I'm tellin' you Andrea, I've got a bad feeling about her."

Silence fell once again, during which this woman in the red uniform jacket, also once again, thought to herself. "I can put it in my security log as a radiation check; it's a bit shoddy if anyone takes a close look into it, but it should be solid enough for us to go ahead with it."

Hank gave her a small but appreciative smile.

It was a couple of minutes ish later when the duo were standing outside the door to the quarters Pria had been given, trying to keep a low profile so as to not risk provoking the suspicion of any passers-by in that corridor.  
"Housekeeping." Andrea called out upon pressing the door chime button. When there came no answer from within after several seconds, they took this as the sign that no one was in, and as a result Hank then proceeded to lead the way as they went in through the door, which slid shut again behind them.   
The inside of the quarters were predominantly plain-looking apart from Pria's uniform jacket being draped over a part of the back of the sofa, an indication that she seemed to be the type of person who didn't take up that much space and preferred to keep to the neat and functional aspects of life most of the time. 

"It'd help me if I had _some_ idea about what we were looking for..." The female one of the two said, looking around the room while Hank went over to investigate a set of drawers nearby with a scanner he was holding. 

"Anything out of the ordinary." 

She nodded in acknowledgement, and then began her own investigating by pulling up the cushions on said sofa for anything concealed beneath before putting them back, so far finding nothing. They moved on to several other objects and furniture pieces in the quarters, until, now having just finished peering underneath the bed by lying down on her stomach on the floor, Andrea looked up to see that there was something strange about the blanket sheet covering the bed mattress: one corner of it - specifically, the one on her left - appeared to be hanging a fraction more loosely compared to the rest, which was tightly wrapped around the mattress. 

"Sir, I'm not sure but I think there might be something here." She called out, upon which Hank walked up next to her as she lifted up that end of the mattress, once again with zero effort as with most other objects like that, and, sure enough, there was indeed an object there, hidden underneath it. 

It appeared to be some kind of rectangular-shaped silver box, whose surfaces were so immaculately polished that their edges gleamed thanks to the ceiling lights above now that they were exposed to the rest of the room outside of that area underneath the mattress. Despite it being able to be described as a box, it appeared to not possess any latches or handles of any kind with which to open it.

"We probably shouldn't touch it." Said Hank, to which Andrea, still holding up the mattress, nodded in agreement.

"What is it...?" She asked with a furrow of her brows.

"I’ve got no idea; it looks like the scan can’t get through to the inside." No matter how long he held his scanner over the box, the screen still continuously came up blank. 

"The last time I checked the UIFA doesn’t tend to have copies of these things sitting around under every bed mattress in ship quarters. Do you think we should tell the Captain?" She looked up at Hank, to which he, too, did the same. 

"Please tell me you pair are joking." This Captain herself said to them bluntly several minutes later, upon being informed about this bedroom search. "You went ransacking her quarters?"

"Andrea isn’t to blame for this. I came up with the idea and I just got her roped into helping me out with it." The oldest of the ship’s main crewmembers told her.

"I appreciate that sir, but I knew what I was getting into; I was the one who falsified the entry reason." The woman with the green eyes spoke up in response. 

"You’re the Chief of Security on a starship - you don’t just go around prying like that without an _actual_ good enough reason, and you don’t keep me in the dark about things like this either!" It was only by a little bit, but Jenna raised her voice at Andrea. 

"Yes ma’am but-"

"And you!" The commanding officer then turned her attention to Hank. "You’re supposed to be my Second Officer, which means that you, me and Martin are all supposed to be setting a good example to the others, and I find out you've snooping around in guest quarters? That’s no different to reading my diary!"

"You’ve got a diary...?" This Lieutenant-Commander asked, previously unaware of the presence of such an item in the possession of this friend of his. 

"I haven’t got a diary but that’s not the bloody point!" Her volume kicked itself up another notch or two higher in exasperation. 

"Look, Jen, we found this silver object thing in there. It was shaped like a rectangle, probably made of metal...-" He began.

The woman in front of the duo sitting at her own quarters’ computer desk did a faux gasp. "Holy mother of God, you found a _rectangle_! That makes everything _so_ much more clear! Why didn’t I go ahead and sound the red alert when I had the chance?!" Her eyes were wide and, to match the gasp she’d given, there was a sarcastic toothy grin on her face, making Hank bite his lower lip in annoyance. 

"Our scans couldn’t penetrate it, ma’am - we had no idea what it was!" Said Andrea in defence. 

Jenna looked back at her. "So that means it could just be a belt buckle or a jewellery box for all you know."

The one in the red uniform jacket momentarily fell silent in realisation. "You’re right, it could be." She said, somewhat quietly.

"You’re both dismissed."   
While the half Human hybrid made her way towards the door and then out into the adjacent corridor, Hank instead chose to stay behind so as to continue his discussion.

"Can I be honest with you for a sec?" She nodded in reply to this query. "Okay then, I think you're being pretty dumb here. You're letting all that charisma Pria gave off to everybody last night cover up the fact that she's not exactly who she says she is."

"What? I don't follow." Jenna looked at the man in front of her with flowering confusion.

"There's no record of her name anywhere on the Altair Mining Industries worker list!"

"Isn't that just because of their-"

"Their high turnover rate, I know, but I don't buy it." He briefly chuckled to himself, as an expression of his own mocking sarcasm. "Jesus, she's got you and all the others wrapped around her finger hasn't she? First she and Martin make goo-goo eyes at each other all damn night and now it looks like I'm the only one on this ship who's not defending her?"

The other Human in the glasses stood up from her chair, leaning slightly over her desk with her hands on its surface and with a few strands of her hair hanging in mid-air. "If you think bringing up these alleged 'goo-goo eyes' is supposed to make me angry with Martin, then you're mistaken. Whoever he hits it off with isn't my business, and it's not yours to bring up like it's some kind of misdeed either. Me and him aren't together anymore, so we can both date whoever we like."

"And that's fine, I'm not saying you two can't, but if it affects his choices here and it ends up causing the same thing from you too, it's my job to point that out to you and him."

"I'm not the one playing Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. In fact, you know what? Let's step back and retrace the steps, shall we?" Said Jenna, sitting back down in her seat. "We rescued this woman from an asteroid in danger of getting burnt into nothing by falling into a star - what, do you think she crashed her own ship so that she could come here and do the dishes?"

"I'm telling you, there's something else going on here. There's something _wrong_ going on, Jen!"

Immediately after he'd finished this second sentence, the two were interrupted as the entire room around them, the entire ship in fact, shook violently for a second, during which the lights in the room additionally went out for one half of this second. The impact threw them both off balance, forcing their hands to fall upon the surface of the desk for support.

"Captain, please report to the bridge; we've ran into some trouble." The voice of the Helmsman came through to the communication system in her computer.

"What's going on?" Asked Jenna as she and Hank both walked onto the bridge no more than thirty seconds later, having walked at a brisk pace due to the the urgency of the fact that the impact they'd felt a minute ago was both very sudden and very rough.

"We don't know where these hits we're taking are coming from; from what we can see there's nothing outside!" Replied Arthur, during which the two newcomers only just managed to sit down in their chairs on the bridge before another of these impacts came and made everyone hold on as tightly as they could. As per usual with coming up against threats, the ship's interior lighting had dimmed and was instead mostly replaced with dark red lighting to match the red alert that had been initiated, along with its alarm sound in the background.

"There's gotta be something out there, we're getting pounded!" Said Martin.

"I think we've encountered a concentrated dark matter storm, sir." Connor spoke up, looking at his station's screen. "Previous Union research says that they're an extremely rare occurence."

"How do we get out of it?" Asked the First Officer, him and the others being unaware of Pria, who was now currently wearing a casual dark blue tunic, appearing at the doorway to the bridge until she then spoke:

"Commander, Captain, I can help." Before she could elaborate after this sentence, there came another hit from whatever it was that was causing them.

"How do you mean?" Said Jenna.

"Me and a couple of my colleagues once came up against a dark matter storm like this on another mining expedition." Explained the other, blonde Captain. "Adjust your scanner array to flood the area around here with neutralised axion particles."

"An intriguing theory - I don't believe such an approach has ever been attempted before." The Science Officer commented, turning around in his seat, before there came yet another impact. 

"Do it." Insisted Pria after this latest one had passed. "Trust me."

During the silence that fell afterwards, Hank looked straight at her out of the corner of his eye at these words, and, deciding that they had no better option at that moment so they might as well, Jenna nodded her head to Connor, who turned back around and began putting this idea into motion at this authorisation.  
Within seconds the neutralised axion particles she'd spoken of were sent out in a wide field all around the _Valkyrie_ , allowing the occupants of the bridge to finally get a look at the source of the hits they were taking not unlike opening a curtain or pulling off a veil. What was surrounding them were what appeared to be large bubbles of antimatter, changing shape at the edges every moment and not even staying still, either - it wasn't very quickly, but they were moving around all over the place, and to make things even worse, there appeared to be dozens upon dozens, probably several hundred of them altogether, as if the ship was trapped inside some kind of giant bubble of its own.

"I feel like I want to say Christ on a bike, but I'm also thinking that's not going to cut it." The Commander spoke his mind out loud.

As another of the bubbles of antimatter collided with the outer hull of the _Valkyrie_ , a few sparks flew down from the ceiling near to Andrea, making her turn her head away and raise her right arm up.  
"Our shields have been weakened ma'am. If we don't get out of this soon we're going to get actual structural damage!"

"What are our options, Mr. Doyle?" The one Andrea had just addressed queried.

"I don't think we have that many: I've never even _seen_ a dark matter storm before, let alone piloted a ship through one!"

"I can do it." Pria spoke again. "I did this the last time, just give me helm control."

Jenna looked towards Hank, who was biting his bottom lip and trying to subtly shake his head at her to say no, before turning her attention back towards Arthur. "Lieutenant?"

"We might as well, ma'am. This is above my pay grade by a _long_ shot." He only just managed to get this reply out before another ceiling spark-inducing impact hit them.

"The shields are gone." Reported Andrea. "One more hit in the wrong place could destroy the ship."

"Do it." 

After hearing this clearance from Jenna, Arthur got up and moved to the side as Pria traversed the bridge and sat down in the Helmsman seat. After a few buttons were pressed, she used one hand for pushing down the lever on the desk and the ship moved forwards; she utilised the other, free hand for still doing some typing, during which what appeared to be a course mapping a safe way out appeared on the viewscreen in the form of coloured lines and large dots at dome points between these lines.  
Everyone held on for dear life once again as she pushed down even further onto the propulsion lever while also pushing it slightly to one of the two sides whenever a turn was required. It were as if the _Valkyrie_ was safely riding straight through an enormous horde of enemy combatants like its namesake, all while she was accomplishing this with the on-the-spot precision of an android.

At one particular moment, a few antimatter bubbles seemed to be coming closer together, probably so as to merge, during which Pria - who was still keeping her eyes on the metaphorical road - and the others around her on the bridge could almost feel themselves holding in their breath as she pressed down even harder onto the lever, putting the ship at its highest non-warp speed. The gap between the slowly merging bubbles was growing more and more narrow until, although it was very nearly a rather tight squeeze, they safely passed through said gap, their eyes then being greeted by the sight of open space out in front of them, the dark matter storm now left behind. 

" _Yes_." Pria released a breath of relief, while most of the others silently did the same.

"What's the damage?" Asked the equally relieved Jenna. 

"The communication systems have been thrown offline, but apart from that we're still in one piece." Replied Andrea with a smile as she looked at her own screen. 

"Are communications completely down?" Said Hank. 

"Yeah, by the looks of it." 

"We'll have to ask Hagalaz Station to help North and the engineers out when we get there." Said Martin. 

"There's actually an Altair base not that far away from here compared to Hagalaz - it's only a day away." The other Captain, now getting up from Arthur's chair, spoke up with her own smile. "One of the systems engineers working there is a friend of mine and he owes me a favour, plus you can drop me off there and I'll be out of your way." 

The man who'd spoken previously nodded his head. "That would save us some time. What do you think, Jen?" 

"Sounds good to me." 

"Great, I'll give your Navigator the coordinates." She turned around and set to work with Markus. 

"You're letting her decide where we _go_ now, too?" Hank hissed to Jenna, keeping his voice down, who looked back at him with a piercing, authoritative look in her eyes. 

"If we needed any more proof that she can be trusted, we just got it." She replied firmly. 

Martin had just finished giving his hair a comb several minutes later. He was in his quarters, and he had a twenty-minute break to spare so he'd decided to kill some of this time by going back to his quarters and tidying up a few things, along with making sure that he was still presentable. It was right when he'd put down the comb on his bedside dresser when the door chime rang. "Come in." 

He walked to the bedroom doorway which separated this room from the rest of his quarters, the main section, to see who it was that had entered. "Oh, hey." He addressed the newcomer amicably. 

It was a certain blonde-haired Captain. "Hi. Me again." Pria jokingly held up her hands for a second in greeting. 

"Captain Lavesque. I know it's kinda late to be saying this but I haven't really got a break from stuff this morning until now: I hope you had fun last night, at the party." He chuckled to himself during the first half of this sentence while fully stepping into the main quarters section, now standing in front of her.

"I did, it was a lot of fun. It's been a while since I got the chance to let my hair down and just hang out with people. And you don't have to do all this 'Captain Lavesque' stuff: you can just call me Pria." It was now her own turn to let out a chuckle.

"By the way, thanks for pointing us in the direction of that AMI base, too." 

"It's the least I can do after everything you and the others here have done for me." That warm, charismatic smile of hers made a return. 

He thought for a moment about his next response, before reaching an idea. "There's something I want to show you. I think you're gonna like it."

  
"You were _not_ wrong about me liking this." She commented in awe another couple of minutes on from this reply. The pair were sitting next to each other in the environmental simulator, looking out over the spikey mountainsides of a simulation of the planet Visteria, which as you can probably guess was the Visterian homeworld - their legs dangled out underneath themselves as they were perched near to the edge of a level cliff, and the scenery before them consisted of trees with a silver bark and dark mint green leaves, these trees all being somewhere around a hundred and fifty feet tall despite not being that thick, with gleaming white buildings of various shapes taking up a small portion of this rural landscape off in the distance and with about a quarter of these trees being partly submerged up to nine and a half feet in the gleaming tranquil lake down below. A waterfall out in front of them which fell down into the lake glittered just as brightly in the bright noon sunlight, and some of the rocks of the ring which surrounded the planet could be faintly seen in the sky. 

"Visteria is one of the prettiest planets in the Union." Agreed Martin, after which an a nopora suddenly appeared out in front of them, announcing its presence with a chirp-like screech and soaring down towards the lake. Noporas were a species of amphibian animal native to this very same world, with scaley skin of a dull orange colour, webbed feet which also possessed claws, three eyes in a triangle shape which could be either green or bright brown and which were all wide like the eyes of an Earth bush baby, and more webbed structures between its fingers; a nopora normally used all of this finger and toe webbing not for flying as such but for gliding down after finding insects or small fish at ground level to eat by climbing up into the trees. Another especially well-known characteristic was that noporas' teeth secreted a venom that could kill a Visterian in twenty minutes, and a Human in thirty-five, but they only made use of this venom on their insect and fish prey. They never bit people unless they were directly provoked by being attacked themselves, though, like how most types of bees just wanted to go about their day and leave people alone if they could. 

"Where did you get this simulation from?" Pria asked while they watched this particular nopora which had just landed in the lake swim beneath its surface. 

"There's this Visterian schoolteacher working onboard, Razeth - she likes to use it sometimes to remind her of home, but she's made it available for other people and said that if they want to use it themselves then she's happy to let them."

"Have you ever gone there for real?" 

"I've been meaning to check it out for a while, but no, not yet." Martin shook his head. 

"I was sent there a couple of times a few months ago, you should go. It really is just as beautiful as it is in this recreation." She took another moment to continue gazing out at the gorgeousness of the scenery before turning her head to the left to look at him. 

"Maybe someday we'll get sent there on some kind of mission, too." He looked back at her in return. "So, I know you've said you did it once before, but how did you learn all those piloting tricks in the dark matter storm so quickly?" 

"I'm out in space going to some place or another pretty much every day, doing it solo nine times out of ten. People like me have to get creative and think on our feet a lot of the time." 

The First Officer felt a dormant urge which had come to life over the last couple of hours become that little bit less dormant. "I like creative." He remembered the thought he'd had yesterday when she'd first appeared on the ship's viewscreen, which was that scenery didn't have to be the only thing that was gorgeous, and the daring but soulful twinkle in her eyes made her even more so. It was very nearly unnoticeable, but the simulation had additionally been programmed with a tiny little breeze, and this breeze caused some parts of the tips of her blonde hair to flutter ever so gently around her shoulders.  
With a bit of hesitation at first but without her resisting against it, Martin leaned forwards slightly and kissed Pria on her left cheek.   
When she smiled at this and still continued to not be trying to resist, he then aimed for her mouth this time, with her also leaning in towards him by a few degrees for their lips to make contact. 


End file.
